Suzanne Plunkett/AP
Author David Sedaris
Author David Sedaris
Memoirs, True and False
by
Liz Colville
The reputation of the once-beloved memoir has been tarnished in recent years by authors sacrificing the truth in favor of a more exciting story—or a more profitable book offer. But a host of classic and new memoirs remain to satisfy our need to read about real people and real events.
In the States, there has been a fascination of late with memoirs that describe raw, challenging experiences in worlds unknown to most of us. James Frey, a drug addict, wrote about spending months in jail. Margaret B. Jones claimed close friendships with members of the Bloods gang in Los Angeles. Both grossly exaggerated their experiences and both have been publicly humiliated for it—Frey by Oprah Winfrey and Jones by her own sister, who outed her to the press. But as Motoko Rich reminds us in the New York Times (following up her official story about Jones), these aren’t the first literary liars of this decade, nor are fabricated memoirs anything new.
Source: The New York Times
For example, “The Education of Little Tree,” was published in 1975 as an autobiography of a man named Asa Earle Carter, who claimed to be part Cherokee and raised by his Cherokee grandparents. It was released, as so many memoirs are, in the midst of a trend: a time of renewed interest about Native American life. An essay by Amy Bollman explains that the book “may be based in part, as the publisher has claimed in the past, on family legends, but it cannot have been based on Carter's life experiences.” She goes on to describe research on Carter’s life and background that exposed the book’s inaccuracies. “The Education of Little Tree” is now sold as fiction.
Source: Native Web
Family life, particularly dysfunctional family life, is the subject of many a successful memoir. Augusten Burroughs’ “Running With Scissors” captivated millions when it was released in 2005. It “spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list, spawned a Hollywood movie, and earned him literary stardom,” writes Vanity Fair in its examination of how true the so-called memoir actually is. The Turcotte family, with whom Burroughs lived growing up, realized that they essentially had a starring role in the book and sued the author for libel, contending that his portrayal of them contained numerous fabrications.
Source: Vanity Fair
Best-selling essayist David Sedaris writes darkly comic anecdotes about his life. Humor sometimes requires a little embellishment to be pulled off, and Sedaris has said that his work is “97 % true …when I write something, I put it on a scale. And if it's 97% true, I think that's true enough. I'm not going to call it fiction because 3% of it isn't true.” Barnes & Noble begged to differ: his latest, “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” was placed on their fiction bestseller list (and shot to the top in its first week of release).
Source: The New York Observer
Hot “reality” topics like family, addiction and gang life often spur people to start writing—and start exaggerating. Tapping into the popularity of books about the high-fashion world, a former columnist for the Times of London, Emily Davies, scored a lucrative deal to write about her life as a high-flying fashion reporter, until Women’s Wear Daily uncovered numerous fabrications, misappropriations and examples of plagiarism, branding her the “James Frey of the literary world.”
Source: The Independent
The best memoirs combine anonymity with adventure—and it’s the “adventure” part that spurs authors to make things up. The alternative is to be famous; a famous person’s life is fascinating to millions. Ernest Hemingway, Barbara Walters and Barack Obama have all accomplished the task, showing us the writer’s life, the journalist’s secret life, and the life of the star politician. George Bernard Shaw said, “The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business,” but the memoir writer is increasingly happy to open up that Pandora’s Box and let us rifle through its contents.
Browse findingDulcinea’s Books Web Guide or Arts & Letters Daily for ways to discover more of the latest memoirs and what critics are saying about them.
Browse findingDulcinea’s Books Web Guide or Arts & Letters Daily for ways to discover more of the latest memoirs and what critics are saying about them.
© 2012 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
