Objective.
This post gets kind of shrill and self-righteous, and I apologize for that in advance. I blame the late hour; it is sometimes easy to confuse a dark night of the soul with just plain night.
The New York Times's oft-infuriating Michiko Kakutani says essentially what I said about James Frey and the devaluation of quaint notions like truth in modern society. She's much more thorough and eloquent about it than I was, of course. Nice to see, though, that I'm not the only one who sees parallels between the Frey's "exagerrations" and the cavalier manner in which (a) the White House lies to us and (b) we take it. See also this post on, of all places, Arianna Huffington's website. Also nice to see folks like William Zinsser and memoirist Mary Karr standing up against the pernicious notion, espoused even by this blog1, that a certain amount of fabrication is to be expected from a memoir.
In conversations with people, including co-workers at BN, where the whole James Frey thing has come up, I'm often greeted with something along the lines of "who cares?" There is a pervasive sense that there are so many more important things going on in the world that one writer making stuff up is not a big deal. Indeed, there are user comments to that effect on Huffington's site. I've spent quite a bit of time wondering why I care so much about this: I already despised both Frey's writing2 and the man himself (or at least his arrogant, narcissistic tough guy public persona, as I've obviously never met him), and it's not as if I feel he's destroying the grand tradition of the personal memoir. Hell, I'd be happy to see the entire genre disappear while I sleep tonight.
There are, of course, the troubling larger-scale implications that our willingness, as a country, to excuse Frey's lies carries; as I said before, it indicates nothing so much as a people that are comfortable with being lied to. That's why this is important, and that's why I won't shut up about it even when people have told me that they don't care. I have to believe that people aren't so gullible that they'll accept "subjectivity" as an excuse for lies, and that they won't reward charlatans for selling them a bill of goods. I have to believe it, because every time I look at the sales figures for A Million Little Pieces, I'm smacked in the face with evidence to the contrary. When it was merely a shitty writer getting rich off of people's lack of taste/willingness to be led around by the nose by Oprah3, that was one thing. But now, it's an entirely different ball game. Now, as Frey might say in defense of his using the tragic deaths of two young girls to stroke his own bottomless ego, it's personal.
1 In my defense, it should be noted that Girls in Skirts on Ladders couldn't care less about the vast majority of memoirs anyway.
2 As does Kakutani, who takes Frey down nicely in the above article.
3 Who, all this recent fuss notwithstanding, I genuinely do respect for her dedication to getting people to actually read books. Usually good ones, too.
The New York Times's oft-infuriating Michiko Kakutani says essentially what I said about James Frey and the devaluation of quaint notions like truth in modern society. She's much more thorough and eloquent about it than I was, of course. Nice to see, though, that I'm not the only one who sees parallels between the Frey's "exagerrations" and the cavalier manner in which (a) the White House lies to us and (b) we take it. See also this post on, of all places, Arianna Huffington's website. Also nice to see folks like William Zinsser and memoirist Mary Karr standing up against the pernicious notion, espoused even by this blog1, that a certain amount of fabrication is to be expected from a memoir.
In conversations with people, including co-workers at BN, where the whole James Frey thing has come up, I'm often greeted with something along the lines of "who cares?" There is a pervasive sense that there are so many more important things going on in the world that one writer making stuff up is not a big deal. Indeed, there are user comments to that effect on Huffington's site. I've spent quite a bit of time wondering why I care so much about this: I already despised both Frey's writing2 and the man himself (or at least his arrogant, narcissistic tough guy public persona, as I've obviously never met him), and it's not as if I feel he's destroying the grand tradition of the personal memoir. Hell, I'd be happy to see the entire genre disappear while I sleep tonight.
There are, of course, the troubling larger-scale implications that our willingness, as a country, to excuse Frey's lies carries; as I said before, it indicates nothing so much as a people that are comfortable with being lied to. That's why this is important, and that's why I won't shut up about it even when people have told me that they don't care. I have to believe that people aren't so gullible that they'll accept "subjectivity" as an excuse for lies, and that they won't reward charlatans for selling them a bill of goods. I have to believe it, because every time I look at the sales figures for A Million Little Pieces, I'm smacked in the face with evidence to the contrary. When it was merely a shitty writer getting rich off of people's lack of taste/willingness to be led around by the nose by Oprah3, that was one thing. But now, it's an entirely different ball game. Now, as Frey might say in defense of his using the tragic deaths of two young girls to stroke his own bottomless ego, it's personal.
1 In my defense, it should be noted that Girls in Skirts on Ladders couldn't care less about the vast majority of memoirs anyway.
2 As does Kakutani, who takes Frey down nicely in the above article.
3 Who, all this recent fuss notwithstanding, I genuinely do respect for her dedication to getting people to actually read books. Usually good ones, too.
posted by Dktr. Blasphemy at 2:59 AM
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