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Why Let Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story?: Nonfiction Writers Find Fiction Tempting

Posted on: Monday, 16 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Alfred Lubrano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jan. 16--There I was, writing my nonfiction book, dying to switch over to fiction for just a paragraph or two.

There were no Truth Police in the vicinity, and the anecdote from my life that I'd been aching to embellish was known only to me. No witnesses!

I started to do it, I really did. With a little creative mendacity, the incident I wanted to amp up would have been funnier, sexier, juicier than real life. Who would know the difference?

I'm remembering all this now as the country contemplates the news that author James Frey's best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contains fabricated material.

Frey and his defenders -- including Oprah Winfrey, whose raves about the book cha-chinged the thing into a Literary Big Deal -- say that memoirs shouldn't be held to the rigorous standards of journalism or historical nonfiction.

"I've acknowledged that I changed things within the realm of what's appropriate for a memoir," Frey said on CNN's Larry King Live this week.

Frey insists that the core of his book -- about a bad-boy alcoholic and drug addict who gets himself clean -- is true, regardless of whatever license he's taken with the facts of his life.

Critics, on the other hand, have been vociferous about Frey's apparently false self-description as a "capital C Criminal."

Thanks to investigative work that appeared on the Smoking Gun Web site last Sunday, we now know that a wild story Frey writes about running his car into an Ohio cop, exchanging punches with officers, and generally inciting mayhem while high on crack was an embroidered tale from start to finish. The only record of a police run-in with Frey described an open-container citation, the site says.

Does this matter? Well, Frey says he went to prison for the incident (reports indicate that he didn't), and many of the events that he says occurred in his life afterward are related to that pivotal moment. Being an ex-con pumps up one's street cred.

Defenders say it's hard to remember everything in your life when you sit down to write.

"But I'd remember if I ever went to jail or not," says a very angry Joan Mellen, a memoirist and a teacher of memoir writing at Temple University. "This is pathetic, really. He obviously lied. This is very bad stuff. The idea you can say you were in jail when you weren't is outrageous. I'm indignant, indignant."

I'm not that happy either, I have to say.

And that's not simply because my book, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, reached only No. 32 on amazon.com's booklist, while Frey has done, well, much, much better.

I never did enrich that anecdote in my book, which is about the white-collar children of blue-collar parents, and contains interviews with 100 people, as well as events from my own life.

I didn't do it for a couple of reasons. First, it's wrong. Believe me, I'm no saint. But I've been a reporter so long I don't think I know how to make stuff up. And fabrication, along with plagiarism, is one of the big sins of my profession.

I couldn't physically do it because it's too colossal a transgression. Besides, I expected the people I interviewed to speak the truth. So should I.

I could have created a nice yarn, though.

To illustrate how working-class guys like me don't get the breaks upper-class folks do, I included in my book the story of how Caroline Kennedy got the copy-boy job at the New York Daily News that I'd wanted. I'd applied, but had been told the editors weren't hiring copy boys. Then, old Caroline got the job. Very unfair.

Anyway, years later, I was in a class at Columbia University that her mother, Jacqueline Onassis, was auditing. It would have been great, I thought, to tell the story of how I cornered Jackie and dressed her down about entitlement, privilege and American aristocracy. "You think you're better than me?" I'd have said.

Of course, nothing like that happened. It sure would have burnished my credentials as a class warrior, though.

Not as black-and-white as I come off, memoirist Judith Barrington tells me that while fabricating experiences is a no-no, inventing dialogue is quite all right.

"Journalists can't make up quotes, but memoirists do it all the time," she says. "You have the leeway to make it a readable story, to shape and hone it into a piece of art. But you're not entitled to change events substantially."

In truth, no one in publishing is particularly upset about all this. "The vilifying of this guy is way over the top," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. Memoirs traditionally are known to hew less scrupulously to the truth than other nonfiction books, publishing types say.

Did Frank McCourt, for example, truly remember all the conversations he had as a 4-year-old, which his memoir Angela's Ashes implies? The doubts didn't hurt sales.

Truth is, books aren't fact-checked the way magazine articles are. Rather than closely question authors about their writing, "all publishers really want to know," Nelson says, "is are we going to get sued?"

Of course, Frey could have said his book was fiction to begin with. But, as Nelson says, "novels don't sell as well as memoirs." People like thinking what they're reading is real.

And that may be Frey's biggest sin.

Recovering addicts are reading his book as an inspiration and guide. If aspects of the work aren't true, what kind of message can people truly take from it?

"Readers are flocking to Frey's redemptive story because they have the same problems," Barrington says. "But it's a betrayal to readers to pretend something major happened to you that did not. Readers will feel betrayed."

Myself, I'd like to think that. Truth is beauty, and all that.

But the bottom line is what counts. And Nelson of Publishers Weekly has her eye on that.

"The book," she says, "is flying out of the stores."

Contact staff writer Alfred Lubrano at 215-854-4969 or alubrano@phillynews.com.

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Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

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