What do James Frey — author of A Million Little Pieces — and Margaret Seltzer (who last week published a book under pseudonym Margaret B. Jones) have in common? Both wrote acclaimed memoirs that turned out to be fabrications.
Today The New York Times article “Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction” detailed how Seltzer, who is white and grew up in a well-to-do community in Los Angeles, portrayed herself in her memoir Love and Consequences as a half-white, half-Native American foster child involved with gang-bangers and drug dealers in South-Central LA.
It was like déjà vu all over again, reading about publisher Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Books USA, recalling all copies of the book and canceling Seltzer’s book tour. I was reminded of the ruckus triggered when The Smoking Gun exposed Frey’s greatly exaggerated account of his years as a drug abuser. Some of you might remember Frey’s appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and how she admonished him and his publisher, Nan Talese of Doubleday, for duping readers (including Oprah).
Last week, the 1997 memoir Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca, also turned up fraudulent. It told the incredible story of a Jewish girl from Brussels who by herself walked from Belgium to Ukraine over a period of almost four years, during which she survived alone in forests, encountered wolves, and stabbed a rapist.
What strikes me most about these cases is the extraordinary, almost over-the-top nature of each memoirist’s life. (Fabricated life, that is.)
These writers don masks, presenting themselves as individuals much more exciting than they really are. What happened to the notion that great writers can tell great stories, even if those stories are about ordinary lives?
In some respects, I can understand the appeal of an out-of-the-ordinary life. Looking back at the memoirs I’ve gravitated towards, more than a few detail highly unusual life experiences.
Consider this soundbite from Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors:
…the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus…The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of…where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull, an electroshock-therapy machine could provide entertainment.
While Running with Scissors did not make my all-time favorite list, I found it engaging enough to buy the sequel Dry. Both books became national bestsellers.
One memoir I enjoyed immensely was Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller. At the age of three, Fuller moved with her family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The opening scene sets the tone for the almost insane adventure Fuller’s family had undertaken — staking a claim as whites in this turbulent, war-torn region of Africa:
Mum says, “Don’t come creeping into our room at night.”
They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, “Don’t startle us when we’re sleeping.”
“Why not?”
“We might shoot you.”
“Oh.”
“By mistake.”
“Okay.” As it is, there seems good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. “Okay, I won’t.”
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight did make my all-time favorites, primarily for writing that would make even the dullest of lives seem magical.
The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr is another best-selling memoir that described a childhood on the edge. What stands out most to me from this book is the scene where the author’s drunken mother starts a bonfire in her front yard, burning up every article of clothing and piece of furniture owned.
Critics characterized Karr’s childhood as “God-awful,” “calamitous,” and “crazy,” yet, again, it was the dazzle of her words that pulled me in and landed this book on my list of favorite memoirs.
I have to wonder, though, if the success of childhood accounts like Running with Scissors, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, and The Liars’ Club has created pressure for memoirists to one-up the drama. To come up with life experiences that are almost so wild-and-woolly that publishers can’t pass them up.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m simplifying.
What I do know is that these fradulent memoirs have cast doubt on the genre as a whole. Lee Gutkind, often described as the godfather of creative nonfiction (of which memoir is a subset), dedicated a special issue of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction to countering damage caused by A Million Little Pieces and helping shed light on the oft-misunderstood genre of creative nonfiction.
In the process of explaining what went wrong with Frey’s book, Gutkind talks about the “Five R’s” — or basic tenets — of creative nonfiction:
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The Real Life aspect of writing
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Reflection of the writers feelings and responses about a subject
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Research about a person, place, idea, or situation
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Reading the work of masters in their profession
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‘Riting
This issue is a must-read for anyone interested in writing or reading memoir. If that happens to be you, I would also encourage you to read two more books from my all-time favorites list.
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing up Small in Mooreland Indiana by Haven Kimmel was almost extraordinary for the boring, small-town life it recounts. And Looking for Mary (Or, the Blessed Mother and Me) by Beverly Donofrio tells the story of a non-practicing Catholic who takes a trip to a holy site where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared.
Both books show how ordinary lives can become ordinary yet engaging stories. No need to have had truly unusual life experiences. And definitely no need to make up extraordinary life experiences.
Just follow Gutkind’s “Five R’s” and you’ll get there.
redravine.wordpress.com 
This brings up so much, yb. My mind and heart are racing with comments. I am presently on the road and don’t have much time, so let me get to it: First, how do I get a copy of that special issue of Creative Nonfiction with those insights from Gutkind?
Second, I love every memoir you mentioned (particularly Mary Karr’s and recommend her sequel, Cherry), but was not familiar with Looking for Mary. Thanks for that tip. When Karr’s last book of poetry came out, Sinners Welcome, I went to a reading and during the question-and-answer period, Karr was asked, “Your memoirs are so dramatic and colorful, why don’t you write fiction.” She replied, with much exasperation, “Because it’s all true!” Here is a link to her NYTimes op-ed piece about James Frey:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15karr.html?scp=4&sq=Mary+Karr&st=nyt
I remember in a writing class reading aloud an opening to a memoir piece that included a sentence about being raised in a home “located at the corner of Center Street and Normal Avenue.” As soon as I stopped reading, my classmates ounced on me and accused me of MAKING IT UP. One said, “Those street names are so contrived.” The fact is, I really was raised in a home at the corner of Center Street and Normal Avenue.
One last anecdote that I would love comments on. A colleague — the editor in chief of a large religious publishing house — took first place several years ago in the some religious press writing awards for an editorial about seeing an eagle fly over a barren field while out on a drive with his daughter. I remember reading the piece and it was glorious. After winning the award, he confessed that he and his daughter had really seen a crow, but he thought an eagle “would work better.” Would he have won a writing award if he had written about the glory of a crow rather than a eagle? Frankly, i think it would have been a more interesting piece.
For those of you who get The New Yorker, the poet Honor Moore has written in last week’s issue a very moving article about her father, the former head of the Episcopal Church, Paul Moore. Her memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, will be published next month. The excerpt in the New Yorker was beautiful in its ordinariness, I thought, even though her father was hiding a painful secret. Honor Moore handled it straight on, with great diginity, making it more about her father and less about herself. Perhaps that’s something to pay attention to. I must confess that I am more inclined to exaggerate my own achievements and failures than the achievement and failures of those closest to me.
In writing memoir, how do we find the balance between keeping an honest eye on ourselves and then having the humility (and courage) to look away from the mirror and write what’s really there . . . which 8 times out of 10 is utterly ordinary? And still glorious!
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Oh — sorry — I just noticed that you provided a link to that special issue of Creative Nonfiction. Thanks.
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I don’t subscribe to any literary magazines except for Creative Nonfiction (and actually my subscription has lapsed). It’s a good one to subscribe to and submit to.
I read Honor Moore’s essay. I agree, it was beautiful AND understated. I thought the tone was fitting to her father’s role and his secret, and in many respects, their lives. And yes, there was that angle of him being gay, but that was an undertone, not the main event. I will get the book. (When I read the essay, I missed that it was an excerpt.)
Crow or eagle? This is where I tend to think you can take liberty with memoir. I agree, it might have been more interesting with the crow. I mean, the symbolism of a crow is SO different from that of an eagle. Something certainly would have changed in that piece.
I look forward to reading Mary Karr’s op-ed on Frey. You know, you sent me The Liars’ Club, sharonimo. So I have you to thank for introducing me to that book 8) .
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You wrote about the books that are above my reach and portrays the people who are unknown in my country, but that mean totally nothing – I am full with the gratitude. Thank you for the lovely post.
Wholeheartedly.
The ordinary stories happens all over the world, but the ordinary life escapes the destiny of the meaningless complaints and it becomes the engaging indeed story because of the people who teach us to evaluate better what lay underfoot – to see not a mud, but the reflections of the heavenly light that makes the mud of the life the attractive one. Thus the beauty raises a question, what’s a mud?
Wow, At a moment I stooped to think, the new question embraced me, what makes the beauty the mud?
Sorry for my long musings – for the usage of space to comments for my diary.
What is related to the concrete article is my Thank You.
By the way, I confessed “Our words spot our pictures because they present what was shown to us as what was created by us” on my
http://www.captains-bridge.blogspot.com.
Was that not a key to the ordinariness of the ordinary stories?
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I like the question your raise about what is mud?, Tomas. I think it does relate to the post. I think of mud as something not very exciting, not glamorous at all.
I do have to wonder, about these authors who come up with outrageous lives, why didn’t they just write fiction. My husband and I were watching something this morning on Good Morning America about Seltzer and Truth and Consequences, and Jim’s comment was that the media make too big a deal of these kinds of cases.
I disagree. Why didn’t Seltzer simply publish her story as fiction? Why would she even attempt to pass it off as nonfiction?
And how could she have thought that no one from her real past wouldn’t recognize her and speak out (as her sister did)? It’s boggling.
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ybonesy, really great piece. I can tell you put a lot of time and research into it and I appreciate that. I have not had time to read the links yet, and I want to come back later and give the piece more attention. It sure has my head spinning with thoughts about memoir.
I love Gutkind “Five R’s” and I need to check out Creative Non-Fiction. I also like your list of memoirs. I hope others will add to the list of great memoirs on this post. I need to start reading more memoir. I used to read a lot of them and lately have been reading more novels and essays.
Sharonimo, great comment as well. Rich with thought and detail. I need to check out your link. But off the top of my head, the eagle and the crow really makes you think about taking creative license with details. I remember Natalie talking about that, too, in terms of how all of our memories can be different than what might actually have been there 20, 30, 40 years ago – I think she mentioned the color of a linoleum floor where she was growing up.
I’ve had that happen as well, where I will write part of my story from memory (the memory of a child) – then when I go back to visit the actual physical place (like revisiting Georgia and S.C. with Mom last year) some of the details might be different, like the color of the water tower behind our house. Do I then go back and change the memory detail? Or stick with the original write?
I’m with ybonesy on the crow and the eagle; I think it’s creative license. And on the water tower. I can use the writing from my memory. That’s my experience of the physical at the time I am writing. All good questions.
About Margaret Seltzer and James Frey – I am wondering also about their editors and publishers. I mean, are editors so quick to want to make a name and a buck these days, that they aren’t doing their homework on whether these writers are writing the truth? It makes you wonder.
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QM, I just left a comment on this post (LINK), which linked back to this one and posed a similar question about publishers. The GMA segment this morning showed just how easy it would have been to check Seltzer’s claim that she graduated from University of Oregon. A 5-minute check online that anyone can do. And, no, she didn’t graduate, which could have raised a flag.
So why didn’t the publisher do the homework? Good question. Are they that busy? It’s really amazing if you think about it.
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I don’t know if it’s time as much as money. I’ve read a lot about how much the role of the editor has changed from being the writer’s friend or mentor (as we read about with Harper Lee), to one of marketer (publishing what sells instead of a well-written, credible book and making money for the publisher, thus increasing their own standing).
It makes you wonder what’s happened to the close writer/editor relationships we’ve heard about in the past. It seems like now, the writer can’t trust the editor, and apparently, vice versa. It’s all about the $$$.
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You know, I just realized, G’s (suburban life) – Comment 13 (LINK) on Walking Your Talk (Do The Arts Matter?) also applies to the competiveness of editing, writing, publishing these days. I thought her comment was so elegant:
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Reading these comments, I’m reminded of an interview I saw with Toni Morrison, when her book, Paradise, was published. She said that the title she originally wanted for the book was War, but her publisher said, “We can’t sell War. But we can sell Paradise.” And this was AFTER she had won the Nobel Prize. The publisher puts more equity in “Paradise” than in the Nobel-prize winning writer.
Also, I remember a call I got from a Sally Jesse Raphael producer when they wanted to feature the book, A Reason to Live, on Sally’s show. I had helped to write/edit it with Melody Beattie. In that book, I talked about my struggle with suicide much earlier in my life and about saving my younger sister from attempting it years later. The Sally producers were very moved by the story until I gave the wrong answer to this question: “When your sister cut her wrists, did you see the blood?” I replied, “No, I was on the phone with her. She had locked herself in a room where she worked and her boss asked me to call her.” The producer: “So you didn’t actually SEE the blood.” I said, “No.”
I didn’t make it on the show. This may provide a clue to what publishers are looking for today.
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It sure seems to provide a clue.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The demand for drama is evident is so many areas and media — from the current surge we can see in the current fighting and bickering between the Dems (yesterday, political blog dailykos.com got 2M hits in one day), to Entertainment Tonight’s keeping alive the story of Nicole Smith (WHO CARES, already!!!), to the so-called celebrity A-list blogs that have a sort of let-it-all-hang-out quality to them.
You didn’t see the blood? Not interested in hearing from you.
How sad is that?
Mary Karr’s op-ed piece is splendid. I loved reading about her own debates with her publisher about key scenes (in the publisher’s opinion) that Karr didn’t recall and couldn’t fabricate. It must be a fine line, and I applaud her for falling on the right side of it. As it was, her childhood was pretty looney, but throughout the book she admitted that much of the memory was blurry. She owned up to that and made it a literary device in the story.
Gutkind, btw, wrote the following about the Frey debacle: “But this kind of noise and hype is not what this journal or the genre to which it is dedicated are all about. It has been our ongoing mission, over more than a decade and 29 issues, to attempt to define the form, to establish reasonable guidelines and to make it clear that what we are about in the literature of reality is truth and accuracty — artfully stated, and ethically and morally motivated. That is the reason this issue — in which we define the major principles anchoring the genre from artistic and ethical points of view — exists.”
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QM, I agree, G’s quote is fitting and eloquent.
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I addressed this issue on my infant blog with this post:
http://ritereading.blogspot.com/2008/03/trauma-envy-presenting-holocaust.html
Writer Reading: Trauma Envy: The Crime of Fraudulent Memoir
My emphasis was on the damage done to actual suffering people by these lying “memoirists,” most especially the Holocaust impersonators, because it feeds the Holocaust Denial machine who then claim all Holocaust survivor tales are fabrications. In that sense, claiming to be writing memoir does real damage and there is absolutely no excuse. As Tomas said, an ordinary life can be written about beautifully.
One of my favorite Holocaust memoir as a teenager was Jerzey Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. It would have been great as fiction, too, but he ruined his reputation by lying and claiming it was memoir. That lie ruined the book for me. It breeched my trust as a reader. There’s more to say, but I said it on my post. This is a subject all writers are pondering.
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Great post, and I love the term you coined, “Trauma Envy.”
Yes, I do think the fradulent memoirists do damage beyond eroding the credibility of real memoirists. It’s especially acute for Holocaust survivor tales, as you point out, providing fodder for revisionists.
I will share a story about other type of damage. When I read A Million Little Pieces, I had just been part of a difficult alcoholism intervention that almost destroyed my family. It’s was the greatest crisis my family had gone through. One of us got a hold of Frey’s book, read it like the Bible, cried through it, passed it on. We all clung to that book. It came at the time that a family member was in rehab. The book was a life saver for us, who were trying to figure out whether we were going to get through this, whether the person we loved was going to get through this.
I read it twice. I stayed in bed in tears both times after finishing it. And then we all learned it was fake.
At first I refused to let go. So what?, I said. It sustained us, it got us through, fact or fiction. But as time wore on, I couldn’t believe the betrayal. It was unforgivable.
I don’t want to overplay my own sense of losing something, because in the end, it’s long passed. But that book was a lifeline for people who needed support, and then it became a joke.
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That is an incredible example of one of the zillions of ways these faux memoirs do damage. It’s being lied to by a trusted friend. And it’s stealing other people’s painful experiences. It’s like a literary confidence scheme. Perjury by book. Jail I say, for all of them!
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Thank you so much for mentioning Lee Gutkind and making people aware of his journal and the “5 R’s” of creative nonfiction. They are my Bible when I write. My deep concern as these bogus memoirs are exposed is that the CNF genre (misunderstood and under-respected as it already is) will become even more marginalized. We all need to make writers – and readers and publishers – aware of the rules and standards of CNF and clarify its place in literature. Perhaps evenutally writers will have integrated its rules and won’t call fabricated work nonfiction any more than they’d call a haiku a sonnet.
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…won’t call fabricated work nonfiction any more than they’d call a haiku a sonnet.
I love this parallel you draw.
I just came from a Natalie Goldberg reading/book signing at an independent bookstore, where she kicked off her talk by bringing up the controversy around Seltzer’s fake memoir. She also mentioned the fabricated Holocaust memoir. Natalie was in town to read from her new book, Old Friend from Far Away – The Practice of Writing Memoir, and she brought up the fake memoir debacle to make the point that even these deceptions demonstrate that there is a lot of energy in memoir.
I thought that was interesting point, a sort of “glass half full” view of the bogus life story phenomenon.
The other thing I want to say, Sarah, is that I’ve read a lot of great writers in Gutkind’s journal. In fact, I read an essay by Natalie, and I read one of the chapters from Robert Wilder’s first book, Daddy Needs a Drink. I like the mix of different kinds of creative nonfiction, the issues dedicated to certain themes, and I like the teaching aspects of the journal, too. I really do need to renew my subscription!!
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ybonesy, really interesting comment by Natalie, about the energy in memoir. A positive spin. I was just taking some time to reread your piece and check out some of the links. (I think I’ll have to make one more pass, too, come back to it again.) It stirs many thoughts about the genre of creative nonfiction.
And the fact that people prefer to pass off a work of fiction as creative nonfiction just proves Natalie’s point – there is a lot of energy in memoir (writing the truth). So much so, that people try to pass off fiction for truth. It’s very strange. A disturbing trend.
I did check out the Creative Nonfiction magazine link. There are some audio excerpts there, too, with Lee Gutkind as he defines the CNF genre: What Is Creative Nonfiction? (LINK).
I think I may subscribe. Though it looks like they are sold out of the Special Issue 29 (and the book it spawned). I only subscrube to Poets & Writers right now (reading time constraints). But the fact that CNF is the only literary magazine you subscribe to says a lot.
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NYT had an article this morning called “A Family Tree of Literary Fakers” — detailing some of the other people who have in the past written and published bogus memoirs. Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/books/08fakes.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
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QM — I ordered Gutkind’s book from Amazon, so it is available.
The link follows, though perhaps that issue of Creative Nonfiction was referring to a different book:
http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Real-Everything-Researching-Nonfiction/dp/0393065618/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205183141&sr=1-2
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I am the researcher who uncovered the Misha Defonseca fraud. So far the US press has ignored that the literary fraud is not only more than a decade old, but a major part of the smokescreen that made it possible to keep the fraud alive in Europe was the near destruction of the original US publisher. The people who were personally and finacially defrauded over the last two decades are just coming to grips with it all a month after the identity fraud portion.
For folks in or near Massachusetts, I will be giving an overview of how I broke through the smokescreen at the Massachusetts Genealogical Council Seminar on April 26 – see http://www.massgencouncil.org To read the publisher’s story and get the blow by blow for the rest of the shoes dropping on this centipede, you’ll have to spend a few hours catching up at http://www.bestsellerthebook.blogspot.com/
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Glad you stopped by, Sharon. That one was a particularly interesting case, particularly because the fabricated story was just so “fantasmical.” And now you’ve added some more layers to the fraud, which I will definitely look into. We often don’t realize what damage is done below the surface of what happens to the readers of these books. It will be quite a good lesson to learn the rest of the story.
Thanks for commenting.
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Sharon, I read a couple of pieces at your link that were posted by the publisher (as well as checking out the contract). And it does shed new light on all sides of the debate. Who is responsible? Writer, publisher, the public? There are so many layers. It does seem like it has created a lot of hardship for all parties involved. It’s good to have more information. It’s a topic for writers that I think will not go away. I’ll continue to check in. Thanks for stopping by.
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