I just have to post my 2 cents about the whole James Frey debacle. The whole idea of being upset because a book is not accurate when it is a memoir is ridiculous.Repeat after me: Memoir. Memory. Memoir. Memory.
A memory is not accurate, no matter how much you want to believe that it is. When you throw drugs into the mix, how on earth can you expect one's memory to be accurate? Who remembers things clearly when one is clean and sober? I personally do not remember every little detail of what happened to me yesterday and I'm clean and sober. If I were to recount my Sunday experience, it would certainly deviate from the truth even while I believe that what I am writing is one hundred percent accurate. And has anyone remembered the matter of point of view? Everyone has their own perception of life and events and not one person's account out of thirty people who experienced the same event would be the same.
What Frey has done is taken his experience - his overwhelming triumphant, positive emergence from a black hole of drug-induced state of being - and interpreted it so that others might find hope in their own situations.
Yes, I am reading A Million Little Pieces, not because of the scandal that broke right as I received it, and not because I believe it to be fiction or non fiction. I am reading this book because I have heard that the writing in it is excellent. That's enough for me.
2 comments:
What sort of drug-induced state was he in to imagine a 3 month jail sentence?
It's fine if he wants to write an embellished account of his life, but why come out and say that it's both true and honest?
But, all that said, I do hope you enjoy the book, and that it's as captivating as it's said to be.
Lingalls - thats true about the 3 month jail stint, but ultimately when I pick up a book that's classified as a memoir, I don't treat it as hard and fast fact anyway. It's not a treatise on alcholism and drug abuse, it's a point of view. I am sure he is not the only one to ever do something like that - after all, in perspective, I believe only 18 pages out of his 300+ page book are being questioned.
I think the one good thing about all the furor over this is that perhaps it will cause editors/publishers to question and check facts such as the three month jail stint more closely. If nothing else, it has prompted discussion over the classifying of a genre and awakened a closer scrutiny of nonfiction works.
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