oh for crying OUT LOUD.
4 Mar 2008 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouBest damn quote on the topic, by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanjia:
"Fiction which is not emotionally honest is artistically bankrupt. Memoir which is not factually honest is morally bankrupt. It is a writer’s moral and artistic obligation to tell the truth in the manner that is appropriate to the story they wish to tell."
Bloody fricking hell, the entire thing was fabricated. [Registration required; use bugmenot.com to get a user/pw.]
It just irritates me, along with the (also thanks to Scalzi) news of a Holocaust victim's story being equally whole-cloth. Each time a significant Freyism comes along, it degrades the public's trust just that much more in works claimed to be "accurate first-person portrayals" -- not to mention raises serious issues on just how much publishers/editors are obligated to fact-check prior to marketing a "real life story!" out the wazoo.
At the very least, I'm told that even if a publisher doesn't know the author's real name, the agent would (because someone has to write the check with the name that correlates to the bank account), and wouldn't that be enough as a place to start? Does that high school really exist? Are the foster brothers currently in jail actually in jail? Considering I can access the rolls of the California correctional system online -- hell, almost every state's correctional system has rolls online (though some do require payment; I think Illinois is behind a pay-to-see firewall) because convicted felon-names are considered public record. I fail to see how one could justify failing to spend even just the fifteen minutes it'd take to fact-check even just that tiny (but so crucial to the story) bit.
When I read something that claims to be nonfiction, I do usually take it for granted that it really IS non-fiction, because I'm under the (perhaps mistaken, but I hope not always!) impression that, y'know, someone earlier in the process confirmed that it's correct, is true, is accurate. At the very least, the entire Frey fiasco -- I would've thought -- would've had agents, editors, publishing houses a bit more leery of just tossing a "personal story" out into the world without at least a modicum of effort to make sure it's true.
Think of your own life: if something had happened to you that was worthy of an autobiography, and your agent or editor said, "we just want to check the details and make sure, it's our policy now so we don't get Freyed, you understand, right?" Is there anyone here who'd find reason to complain? Wouldn't the natural, honest reaction be: "oh, I totally get that, and if you need more information -- like the 'real names' of the people whose names were changed, or the 'real locations' and more specific dates, just let me know." If you're telling the truth, you've nothing to hide.
You may cloak it for the sake of courtesy or privacy within the story itself, but unless we're talking about state secrets here, I doubt some agent's going to see "learning the real names or dates" as saleable information to make a buck off your memoirs. ("The guy in chapter three was really Joe Smith, not John Brown!!" isn't the same at all as "the unnamed officer who attacked the guy in the bowling alley was really Colin Powell!!")
We get inundated with information everywhere we go: billboards to radio to television to the endless plethora of self-posted and self-confirmed and uncorrelated information on the 'net. ("It must be true; I read it in a Really Old Book" is now "It must be true; I saw it on Wiki".) It gets harder and harder to parse out what's accurate and what's fabrication, and while I think most folks these days approach the net with a certain healthy (if hard-learned, sometimes) skepticism, what's printed on paper has to go through a great many more hoops and therefore is expected to have been checked by at least more than one set of eyeballs. An agent, an editor, a copyeditor, possibly a second editor, and then there's the marketing team who figures out how to place and present and sell the product... all these people are going to be reading the work before it even gets turned into honest-to-goodness really-on-paper nicely-bound book.
I know some minor errors in spelling and grammar may sometimes be missed (since it's really the author and copyeditor who're paying the most attention to those details) but the really big stuff, like: does that location really exist, or did that event actually happen, or are those people confirmed as real people? ... how can you miss that? How can anyone in the autobiography genres not be more than just a little careful about fact-checking after the massive embarrassment of Frey?
It's a case of crying wolf, honestly -- and it makes it that much harder, too, for someone whose story is genuine. Let's say you've had an autobiography you've been tossing around at the encouragement of friends, family, and maybe a few people in the industry [and to make it clear, this sure ain't me!]. How would you be feeling right now? Do you think anyone in that publishing house would take you seriously? Would you set aside your draft and say, "I'd get ripped apart as Just Another Fake," if not by the really-wants-to-believe, well-meaning agent/editor then by a skeptical and disheartened media and public? Would you consider the chances that you're going to be dismissed by folks as "just another Frey waiting to be uncloaked" as reason to keep your trap shut?
On a more personal level, for every person who claims "a really hard and horrible life" -- that then turns out to be complete fabrication -- how do you think this impacts people who really have had that life? What are the chances that for some, silence is preferable over having someone reply, "oh, yeah, sure, you and James Frey and that chick with the LA gangster story, whatever." It's hard enough to tell some personal stories without it hanging over your head that the major examples floating around were all false wolves. Nothing's more painful than to tell the truth and realize no one believes you -- again -- but that this time it's not because they wouldn't want to believe, or wouldn't empathize as human beings, but because previous storytellers have destroyed the listeners' faith in such stories possibly being true.
A part of it sickens me, but a part of it also frustrates me to no end. After the post I did on the city, for instance, someone's comment was that such stories only have potential, in a printed format, if there's a great deal more trauma (Hahahaha, uh, NO THANKS) or if you've got academic credentials and can present it as an anecdotal-type study. I can see how, if someone doesn't qualify as academic name-brand, that the alternative is to beef up the story into something traumatic enough that the autobiography carries punch. I just don't think it's right to consider it a zero-sum (personal, or academic) because I do think that sometimes, those "to whom it happened" are often the worst at representing it.
Anyone can write a sentence; to truly communicate is hard. To communicate the essence of a reality, to capture what is truly there is damn hard -- this is why the Pulitzer Prize recognizes the rare journalists who can genuinely move you through their careful, but honest, portrayal of situations. Those in the midst of a situation can't always have the distance required to note that this detail carries a weight and should remain, while those other details are just noise. I look at new writers in the SFF genre who are excessively fascinated with their elaborately-planned worlds, and the number of superfluous details they have to pile into the story because they know those details exist -- that's exactly what it's like listening to someone "who was really there" give you a run-down.
It's very hard to self-censor the details of something you experienced yourself. It's hard to extract what has meaning in a universal sense, and what has meaning because it's something that's garnered meaning to you in the time since, or has meaning withing your personal mythos. The post I did on the city, for instance, I must've edited almost daily for about two weeks before finally letting go (yes, even after people were responding), because I kept finding details that -- in hindsight, after posting -- I realized had little value to anyone but me, because over time, those details had gained a certain double-meaning or loaded-meaning for me... but that a distant observer wouldn't catch that, at all. (I was not so strict with the post I did on abusive families, since it was a more personal-anecdotal post and not so much for "here's what you can learn as a writer", and thus self-loaded details were going to be part of the presentation.)
If that's not entirely clear, here's an example. I could tell you about the argument I had with my grandmother when I was seven or eight. I recall she was wearing a blue apron. If I'm not able to self-censor, I'm probably going to mention the blue apron, but the lack of distance means I can't articulate -- or may not even stop to consider the necessity of articulating -- why I include that detail, what exactly "a blue apron" means to me, in my personal mythos. When we read -- fiction, or non-fiction, in this case it's all the same -- we're looking at the details and saying, "this is included, this is taking up space on the page, for a reason." An overload of non-censored, chosen-by-mythos, details is an overload of information chosen not for its impact or message to the reader but to its value to the writer, and newsflash, the book doesn't exist to make the writer feel good but to communicate to the reader.
Which means: sometimes, what might make a good autobiography is only going to be a great autobiography if it's got a good ghostwriter in there: someone who has the distance to censor the superfluous or personally-loaded, and to highlight those details that carry universal impact. And, too, sometimes, to illustrate or more clearly articulate some assumptions that the first-person-speaker may not even realize exist. I speak of "Montgomery Alabama," and there's a lot of people who don't realize just what that's like, but I sort of take it for granted, most times, that any listeners will roll their eyes and sigh along with me about the agonies of a cultural wasteland. If a writer lacks the personal/emotional distance to see their own past as a separate, "didn't really happen to me" event, then a strong editor-cum-ghostwriter is required to insert that distance.
That's why I argue that in some ways, having someone who stood at the edges of an event and observed is about as good as we'll ever get on knowing the inwardness of a situation. The person relaying words back to us from the front lines, from the sports arena, from the front step of a burning building, may not be the soldier or the athlete or the fireman, but is in a position to carefully select from among the experiencer's words and compile it, and the relevant environmental information, to give us as close-to-it as we might get. (Again, reading Pulitzer Prize winners is a really good way to see this done at a high calibre.)
What kind of genre is that? It's not autobiography, and it's not really an academic, if anecdotal, study of a subculture. It's just one person's observations, if savvy or astute, about a set of events. It's non-fiction (with a nod to the fact that some non-fiction may still retain 'fictionalized' sections where names/locations are changed or compiled for reasons of privacy), but it's an essay-type of nonfiction.
Some of our most powerful insights come second-hand, through illuminating voices. Bill Bryson is the best example as a travel-essayist, but there's also first-hand outsider accounts like Fraser's On the Rez, as well as personal-infused academia-essay collections like Mahoney's The Early Arrival of Dreams. Bryson may've already captured the best title, though, with I'm a Stranger Here Myself.
Thing is, a set of essays and retold stories from the front lines could be, and has been, just as powerful as first-person. I can't see any reason it'd be knocked aside if well-told... unless the factor I'm ignoring is that there are people who desperately want to be seen as Someone Who Went Through It. That seems to be the case for Frey, and the case for this pathetic Ms Seltzer, and the rest of their con-artist ilk. Because, y'know, then you could hang out on Oprah and get all sorts of sympathy for what you went through *cough* along with everyone being so impressed that you lived to tell, blah blah blah. Okay, so, ego-trip.
Still. It's a pity.
And I still say publishing houses, editors, and agents, need to get off their collective asses and stop making fools of themselves -- and the rest of us -- by doing some simple fact-checking.
ETA: I twigged on this, after posting (from the NYT article):
Reminds me of that catchphrase, "if you can remember the sixties, you probably weren't there."
rachelmanjia:"Fiction which is not emotionally honest is artistically bankrupt. Memoir which is not factually honest is morally bankrupt. It is a writer’s moral and artistic obligation to tell the truth in the manner that is appropriate to the story they wish to tell."
Bloody fricking hell, the entire thing was fabricated. [Registration required; use bugmenot.com to get a user/pw.]
In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.Hat tip to John Scalzi, who observes with his usual dry wit:
Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.
Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.
You know, the rules of a memoir are pretty simple. If an event actually happened to you, you can use it in a memoir. If it didn’t actually happen to you, you can’t. Because then it’s fiction, you see. Which is different from a memoir. No, really; you can look it up. I’m not sure why this has suddenly become so difficult for everyone to process.I really fail to see why someone would feel it lends more credence to have a compiled, second-hand, or observed, story be touted as "personal experience" when it from what I read of the first chapter, it would've worked just fine as "fiction based on actual events, names & places changed" with an afterwards about how the author had spent time in those situations and chose to give a voice to the people she'd met. Or alternately, publish it as non-fiction but with the author's narrative retained as an observer, instead of having to fully insert oneself into the action? What is up with all the Freying going on, anyway?
It just irritates me, along with the (also thanks to Scalzi) news of a Holocaust victim's story being equally whole-cloth. Each time a significant Freyism comes along, it degrades the public's trust just that much more in works claimed to be "accurate first-person portrayals" -- not to mention raises serious issues on just how much publishers/editors are obligated to fact-check prior to marketing a "real life story!" out the wazoo.
At the very least, I'm told that even if a publisher doesn't know the author's real name, the agent would (because someone has to write the check with the name that correlates to the bank account), and wouldn't that be enough as a place to start? Does that high school really exist? Are the foster brothers currently in jail actually in jail? Considering I can access the rolls of the California correctional system online -- hell, almost every state's correctional system has rolls online (though some do require payment; I think Illinois is behind a pay-to-see firewall) because convicted felon-names are considered public record. I fail to see how one could justify failing to spend even just the fifteen minutes it'd take to fact-check even just that tiny (but so crucial to the story) bit.
When I read something that claims to be nonfiction, I do usually take it for granted that it really IS non-fiction, because I'm under the (perhaps mistaken, but I hope not always!) impression that, y'know, someone earlier in the process confirmed that it's correct, is true, is accurate. At the very least, the entire Frey fiasco -- I would've thought -- would've had agents, editors, publishing houses a bit more leery of just tossing a "personal story" out into the world without at least a modicum of effort to make sure it's true.
Think of your own life: if something had happened to you that was worthy of an autobiography, and your agent or editor said, "we just want to check the details and make sure, it's our policy now so we don't get Freyed, you understand, right?" Is there anyone here who'd find reason to complain? Wouldn't the natural, honest reaction be: "oh, I totally get that, and if you need more information -- like the 'real names' of the people whose names were changed, or the 'real locations' and more specific dates, just let me know." If you're telling the truth, you've nothing to hide.
You may cloak it for the sake of courtesy or privacy within the story itself, but unless we're talking about state secrets here, I doubt some agent's going to see "learning the real names or dates" as saleable information to make a buck off your memoirs. ("The guy in chapter three was really Joe Smith, not John Brown!!" isn't the same at all as "the unnamed officer who attacked the guy in the bowling alley was really Colin Powell!!")
We get inundated with information everywhere we go: billboards to radio to television to the endless plethora of self-posted and self-confirmed and uncorrelated information on the 'net. ("It must be true; I read it in a Really Old Book" is now "It must be true; I saw it on Wiki".) It gets harder and harder to parse out what's accurate and what's fabrication, and while I think most folks these days approach the net with a certain healthy (if hard-learned, sometimes) skepticism, what's printed on paper has to go through a great many more hoops and therefore is expected to have been checked by at least more than one set of eyeballs. An agent, an editor, a copyeditor, possibly a second editor, and then there's the marketing team who figures out how to place and present and sell the product... all these people are going to be reading the work before it even gets turned into honest-to-goodness really-on-paper nicely-bound book.
I know some minor errors in spelling and grammar may sometimes be missed (since it's really the author and copyeditor who're paying the most attention to those details) but the really big stuff, like: does that location really exist, or did that event actually happen, or are those people confirmed as real people? ... how can you miss that? How can anyone in the autobiography genres not be more than just a little careful about fact-checking after the massive embarrassment of Frey?
It's a case of crying wolf, honestly -- and it makes it that much harder, too, for someone whose story is genuine. Let's say you've had an autobiography you've been tossing around at the encouragement of friends, family, and maybe a few people in the industry [and to make it clear, this sure ain't me!]. How would you be feeling right now? Do you think anyone in that publishing house would take you seriously? Would you set aside your draft and say, "I'd get ripped apart as Just Another Fake," if not by the really-wants-to-believe, well-meaning agent/editor then by a skeptical and disheartened media and public? Would you consider the chances that you're going to be dismissed by folks as "just another Frey waiting to be uncloaked" as reason to keep your trap shut?
On a more personal level, for every person who claims "a really hard and horrible life" -- that then turns out to be complete fabrication -- how do you think this impacts people who really have had that life? What are the chances that for some, silence is preferable over having someone reply, "oh, yeah, sure, you and James Frey and that chick with the LA gangster story, whatever." It's hard enough to tell some personal stories without it hanging over your head that the major examples floating around were all false wolves. Nothing's more painful than to tell the truth and realize no one believes you -- again -- but that this time it's not because they wouldn't want to believe, or wouldn't empathize as human beings, but because previous storytellers have destroyed the listeners' faith in such stories possibly being true.
A part of it sickens me, but a part of it also frustrates me to no end. After the post I did on the city, for instance, someone's comment was that such stories only have potential, in a printed format, if there's a great deal more trauma (Hahahaha, uh, NO THANKS) or if you've got academic credentials and can present it as an anecdotal-type study. I can see how, if someone doesn't qualify as academic name-brand, that the alternative is to beef up the story into something traumatic enough that the autobiography carries punch. I just don't think it's right to consider it a zero-sum (personal, or academic) because I do think that sometimes, those "to whom it happened" are often the worst at representing it.
Anyone can write a sentence; to truly communicate is hard. To communicate the essence of a reality, to capture what is truly there is damn hard -- this is why the Pulitzer Prize recognizes the rare journalists who can genuinely move you through their careful, but honest, portrayal of situations. Those in the midst of a situation can't always have the distance required to note that this detail carries a weight and should remain, while those other details are just noise. I look at new writers in the SFF genre who are excessively fascinated with their elaborately-planned worlds, and the number of superfluous details they have to pile into the story because they know those details exist -- that's exactly what it's like listening to someone "who was really there" give you a run-down.
It's very hard to self-censor the details of something you experienced yourself. It's hard to extract what has meaning in a universal sense, and what has meaning because it's something that's garnered meaning to you in the time since, or has meaning withing your personal mythos. The post I did on the city, for instance, I must've edited almost daily for about two weeks before finally letting go (yes, even after people were responding), because I kept finding details that -- in hindsight, after posting -- I realized had little value to anyone but me, because over time, those details had gained a certain double-meaning or loaded-meaning for me... but that a distant observer wouldn't catch that, at all. (I was not so strict with the post I did on abusive families, since it was a more personal-anecdotal post and not so much for "here's what you can learn as a writer", and thus self-loaded details were going to be part of the presentation.)
If that's not entirely clear, here's an example. I could tell you about the argument I had with my grandmother when I was seven or eight. I recall she was wearing a blue apron. If I'm not able to self-censor, I'm probably going to mention the blue apron, but the lack of distance means I can't articulate -- or may not even stop to consider the necessity of articulating -- why I include that detail, what exactly "a blue apron" means to me, in my personal mythos. When we read -- fiction, or non-fiction, in this case it's all the same -- we're looking at the details and saying, "this is included, this is taking up space on the page, for a reason." An overload of non-censored, chosen-by-mythos, details is an overload of information chosen not for its impact or message to the reader but to its value to the writer, and newsflash, the book doesn't exist to make the writer feel good but to communicate to the reader.
Which means: sometimes, what might make a good autobiography is only going to be a great autobiography if it's got a good ghostwriter in there: someone who has the distance to censor the superfluous or personally-loaded, and to highlight those details that carry universal impact. And, too, sometimes, to illustrate or more clearly articulate some assumptions that the first-person-speaker may not even realize exist. I speak of "Montgomery Alabama," and there's a lot of people who don't realize just what that's like, but I sort of take it for granted, most times, that any listeners will roll their eyes and sigh along with me about the agonies of a cultural wasteland. If a writer lacks the personal/emotional distance to see their own past as a separate, "didn't really happen to me" event, then a strong editor-cum-ghostwriter is required to insert that distance.
That's why I argue that in some ways, having someone who stood at the edges of an event and observed is about as good as we'll ever get on knowing the inwardness of a situation. The person relaying words back to us from the front lines, from the sports arena, from the front step of a burning building, may not be the soldier or the athlete or the fireman, but is in a position to carefully select from among the experiencer's words and compile it, and the relevant environmental information, to give us as close-to-it as we might get. (Again, reading Pulitzer Prize winners is a really good way to see this done at a high calibre.)
What kind of genre is that? It's not autobiography, and it's not really an academic, if anecdotal, study of a subculture. It's just one person's observations, if savvy or astute, about a set of events. It's non-fiction (with a nod to the fact that some non-fiction may still retain 'fictionalized' sections where names/locations are changed or compiled for reasons of privacy), but it's an essay-type of nonfiction.
Some of our most powerful insights come second-hand, through illuminating voices. Bill Bryson is the best example as a travel-essayist, but there's also first-hand outsider accounts like Fraser's On the Rez, as well as personal-infused academia-essay collections like Mahoney's The Early Arrival of Dreams. Bryson may've already captured the best title, though, with I'm a Stranger Here Myself.
Thing is, a set of essays and retold stories from the front lines could be, and has been, just as powerful as first-person. I can't see any reason it'd be knocked aside if well-told... unless the factor I'm ignoring is that there are people who desperately want to be seen as Someone Who Went Through It. That seems to be the case for Frey, and the case for this pathetic Ms Seltzer, and the rest of their con-artist ilk. Because, y'know, then you could hang out on Oprah and get all sorts of sympathy for what you went through *cough* along with everyone being so impressed that you lived to tell, blah blah blah. Okay, so, ego-trip.
Still. It's a pity.
And I still say publishing houses, editors, and agents, need to get off their collective asses and stop making fools of themselves -- and the rest of us -- by doing some simple fact-checking.
ETA: I twigged on this, after posting (from the NYT article):
Over the course of three years, Ms. McGrath... worked closely with Ms. Seltzer on the book. “I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story never has changed,” Ms. McGrath said. “All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks.”Which rather amuses me (when not frustrating me), because the only stories I ever have completely accurately are the ones I make up myself. Hell, like talking to M about what-happened-when... "I got married in 91," she said, "and wasn't that when you came to stay with us?" And I said, "I thought it was year after, because didn't I have appendicitis in 92? Wait, I met P in fall of 90, no, had to have been 91, because I started dating J in spring of 92..." We were both there when it happened, and we couldn't get our years right! Of course my story changes as I piece together things long forgotten or discarded. Memory is an imperfect thing.
Reminds me of that catchphrase, "if you can remember the sixties, you probably weren't there."