False memoir syndrome
Trauma hucksters' lies must be exposed, but autobiographers deserve some creative licence
By Libby Brooks
This spring, the celebrated - then latterly pilloried - US writer James Frey will publish his first novel. Two years ago, Frey's bestselling memoir of alcoholism, drug addiction and incarceration, A Million Little Pieces, was exposed as a work of substantial fiction. Previously lauded by the most powerful book club on earth, he famously offered a tearful onscreen apology to a disabused Oprah Winfrey, claiming that veracity was relative, and that the "emotional truth" of his work would continue to resonate.
My friend Helen is having similar problems with the truth. Helen Garner, perhaps best introduced as the Australian Fay Weldon, has just brought out her first work of fiction for six years. The Spare Room is the story of two women friends in their 60s, one of whom is dying of cancer. Nicola travels to Melbourne to pursue a course of alternative treatment that is evidently, to all but her, hokum. While she maintains her hopeless hope, she lodges with an old pal, who battles her own inveterate cynicism alongside Nicola's denial.
It's a beautiful work. But, in one sense, I'd heard it all before. Nicola was real, though that's not her real name. I had known about her stay, the wacky treatments, her death as they happened. But Helen's fictional rendering of these sharp realities has now left her exposed, as interviewers and reviewers hint at something underhand, attempting to drag the story back to where they perceive its origins ought to be.
There is, of course, an obvious transformation that occurs when a book is written as fiction. It distinguishes this writer from Frey, and from Margaret Seltzer and Misha Defonseca, whose memoirs about growing up in gangland Los Angeles and the Warsaw ghetto, respectively, were exposed as fraudulent this month. Offering a story in novel form alerts the reader that they would be wrong to assume events happened that way, because the writer has taken all the liberties of compression and conflation and invention that fiction permits.
Given the outrage greeting the news that yet another memoir has proved less than verbatim, it is clear the public does not permit such liberties to those who claim to write from experience. And, on grounds of simple mis-selling, nor should it. Those trauma hucksters who manipulate the seemingly boundless appetite for tales of survival and redemption deserve to be held to account. Then again, in a market where true stories sell better, the urge to embellish is hardly surprising. Scanning the supermarket shelves that heave with misery memoirs, each detailing abuses and degradations more hideously imaginative than the last, I can only marvel at so many terrible childhoods.
But it has become an automatic calumny to express doubt about memoirs. As part of what Frank Furedi has described as "the promiscuous transformation of memory into public performance", the claim of authenticity now confers an unimpeachable moral authority - and that trumps good art.
When Margaret Seltzer, author of Love and Consequences, the memoir of a mixed-race foster child drug-running for the gangs of South Central LA, was revealed as an educated white woman raised in an affluent suburb, she claimed that she was motivated by a desire to give a voice to the voiceless. While Seltzer was naive to think she could get away with pure ventriloquism, for those memoirists who embroider and elide rather than bake from scratch, the lines of responsibility are not so straight.
All writing is creative, and memory is a dubious guide. To focus on the occasional shyster who exploits our thirst for other people's experience also distracts from any investigation into that thirst. It's a lucrative trend the publishing world cannot fathom but is willing to facilitate. Experience is at once universal and unique, but the ascendancy of the personal memoir suggests a culture in which proxy maundering is mistaken for emotional literacy. As for the memoirists themselves, there should be only one responsibility - to write it well.
Thursday March 20 2008
The Guardian
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