Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Fabricated Memories

Over at Shakespeare's Sister, Somewaterytart started a lengthy and interesting discussion about James Frey, who apparently fabricated much of his confessional 'memoir'. The comments represent just about the entire range of opinion, from 'who cares' to 'this guy has done real damage'; I suppose I'm somewhere in between, but I'm not sure exactly where.

But I think Jon Carroll, writing about Frey and the (apparently) fictional memoirist J T Leroy, puts them nicely in perspective:

One point [Freakonomics] makes is that raising incentives to cheat will inevitably raise the incidence of cheating. If you get a $10 bonus for meeting your quota of drains unclogged, you'll probably just go about unclogging drains. But if you get a $10,000 bonus for meeting your quota, you might be tempted to cook the books. Create fictional unclogged drains, or count the same drain twice, or whatever other scheme occurred to you.

The sorry fact is that fiction is fading from the publishing scene. Fewer works of fiction are being published, and fewer works of fiction are being read....

What's new and hot in publishing today? Nonfiction memoirs. Everyone with a colorful past is producing a manuscript....

So OK. Suppose you are a young writer with a flair for dialogue and a taste for the seam-ier side of life. In a previous lifetime, you might have been Raymond Chandler or Charles Dickens. But now -- you're nobody, you're not connected, all you have is a first novel and you're thinking about self-publishing oh God oh God. But then you think: What if it were all true? Because if it were all true, you'd have a career. You could be a talented writer who was read by readers, as opposed to a talented writer reciting today's specials.

So lying pays off....little downside; big upside. Whoever JT LeRoy is, we at least know that he/she/they are human.

In other words, James Frey and J T Leroy are the product of a culture that no longer values fiction. Reading Carroll's column makes me immensely sad, because I think he's probably right.

I don't believe in much, but all my life I have believed in fiction. I believe it is important and necessary. I'm not sure reading fiction makes people better, but at a gut level I believe that not reading fiction makes them worse.

And I believe that a culture that ceases to regard fiction, that yearns for 'reality' television and tell-all books rather than works of imagination, loses something enormously valuable. Non-fiction can be factual, but only fiction can be true.

[That's all, folks]