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Whenever
I see my niece, she asks me to regale her with stories from
her father's and my collective childhoods. "Tell me a story!"
she demands with the beguiling grace of a pit bull tearing
apart a t-bone steak.
I wrack
my brain for a story that is both entertaining and G-rated.
My best stories involve fistfights and blood, getting over
on parents and teen drinking, but those stories are out. "Uh,
did I ever tell you the story about the Marshmallow Fluff?"
I know I have, but this is a good story—one of her favorites.
"No! Tell me that story. What's Marshmallow Fluff?" Oh, kids
today. They're so deprived.
I start
in on the story. "Well, your grandmother was on the phone,
as she so often was in those days. Your dad and I were three
and four. Back in those days, phones had cords, so you couldn't
really walk around with them." At some point during the telling
of the story, my brother will stop me and say, "That's not
how it happened." And then he'll launch into some bizarro
version of the truth—a story that he insists is true
but I know is not. That's not how I remember it.
 This,
of course, is the eensy little problemette with the memoir
and other forms of creative non-fiction. The way I remember
something may not be the way my brother or my mother remember
it. Before the James Frey fiasco, people read memoirs and
creative nonfiction and accepted them as fact, with minor
fabrications, embellishments, and mis-rememberings. We understood
that most people do not have the much-lauded photographic
memory. We got that Hunter S. Thompson and David Sedaris might
be stretching things a bit, and we took Lucy Grealy's memoir
at face value (see what I did there? That's a joke because
it was called Autobiography of a Face).
We had
an assumption of author and publisher responsibility—that
no one would publish non-fiction they knew was fake, would
they? But it turns out publishers don't go too far out of
their way to find out if something is true or not. Fact-checking
is not done. Shocking, I know! You all thought there was a
department of quiet, pallid, ancient nerds sitting together
in a dingy, dusty, book-filled room, all of them on first-name
basis with the research librarians at the New York Public
Library, living lives of quiet desperation just to make sure
everything in a book was true. As lovely as this image is,
it is but a dream. Publishers rely on the author to tell the
truth, which, really, is probably a mistake. You've all met
authors—would you trust them?
But exactly
how much fabrication will people accept in their nonfiction?
Despite the fact that many people enjoyed A Million Little
Pieces when they thought it was a memoir, a lot of those
same people were angry when they found out he made it up.
It amuses me that people (and the media) can get so riled
up about literary duplicity and yet continue to elect lying
and underhanded politicians. What's worse: the lie about a
vomit-covered Frey getting on a commercial air flight or "weapons
of mass destruction" and uranium sales to Iraq? Sometimes
I think that we collectively took out our anger regarding
our government's truthiness on poor li'l James and his pal
Leonard.
I imagine
some readers may have abandoned the memoir genre entirely
after Frey. O.K., I can't imagine that. Memoirs are the National
Enquirer of the literati. Almost everyone I know loves
them but will only cop to it when drunk. Even post-Frey, though,
we still expect truth from the memoir, or at least a version
of the truth. And just last month, two memoirs were revealed
as fraud. Oy vey, will we ever learn? The big one was Love
and Consequences by Margaret Seltzer (writing as Margaret
B. Jones), an inspirational tear-jerker about a white girl
raised by a black foster mother in the ganglands of East LA.
Seltzer, it turns out, is from an upper-middle class family
and went to a private school.
 A
more confusing and heartbreaking story is that of Monique
DeWael, writing pseudonymously as Misha Defonseca, whose 1997
worldwide best-seller, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust
Years turned out to be fake. DeWael claimed her Jewish
parents were killed by Nazis when she was four. She trekked
thousands of miles across Europe, was raised by wolves, and
killed a German soldier. The only true thing about the story
was that her parents were killed by the Nazis when she was
a child, which by itself is a terrible, terrible thing. I
can think of 100 ways that DeWael could have written this
memoir so that it would be true, and still leave in the being
raised by wolves part. I'm pretty sure if my parents were
killed when I was four, I would fantasize about being raised
by wolves, too.
But why
would someone do this? Sometimes I think it's out of laziness,
not wanting to put the effort into writing a well-crafted
story. Maybe the average fake memoirist is just so bad at
writing that she knows she can't sell her book as fiction.
I know I hold fiction writers to a higher standard regarding
structure and prose. Nothing personal, but I'm not reading
the memoir of a crack whore for beautiful sentences. I just
hope that this recent rash of confabulation doesn't staunch
the heavy flow of published memoirs.
Perhaps
we as readers need to keep our salt shakers near when we indulge
in our memoir reading. But whom do we trust? The more outrageous
memoirs are more compelling but seem less likely to be true..
That's not to say that high-drama memoirs are likely to be
false; we all know people who lived through some crazy things.
And hundreds of memoirs are published each year without incident.
We shouldn't condemn all memoirists because of the sins of
a few.
Of course,
neither I nor my super-obnoxious brother are making up the
Fluff story. The basic facts are the same. Our mother talked
on the phone endlessly. We were oh-so-hungry and forced to
make our own fluffernutters. Our stories differ only in who
moved the chair, who climbed up to the cabinet for the accoutrements,
and who got out the knife and the bread. I think we both agree
that I was in charge of the knife. That was foolish! But I
made sure there was a good Fluff-to-peanut butter ratio, and
isn't that the important thing? But, if I were Misha, Margaret,
or James, this story would have involved days of starvation,
tiny but ferocious dogs, a father who beat us and probably
a visit from an uncaring Family Services worker with a meth
problem and a tat that said "Born to Raise Hell."
(April,
2008)
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