I Am Almost Inspired

I admit it. I’m now officially a James Frey junkie.

I check the net every half hour or so to see if there are any new developments because for some reason, I am intensely interested in the outcome of this situation. I suppose part of its because this falls within my sphere of interest. It is news, dramatic, discussion worthy, highly debateable and yes, exciting news about a writer.

A writer who has lied.

Of course, it was Neil-O himself who once wrote, “Writers are liars, my dear. Surely you have realized that by now” in Calliope and here is that concept coming out once more. But this time, there seems to be greater consequences. Because there is so much money, and, more importantly to Oprah Winfrey, so much reputation at stake, drastic measures are being taken that are doing things that no literature professor or writer could ever do single-handedly and usually takes a few generations to really take hold.

Oprah Winfrey is redefining how we define literature.

It is kind of stunning to me now to hear phrases like “It’s a new kind of memoir,” and “The important thing, the thing that REALLY matters in a memoir, is the EMOTIONAL TRUTH, not the historical truth.”

Everyone is passing the buck here. Oprah has said that she relies on the publishers to ascertain the authenticity of the non-fiction they receive, so she’s washed her hands of the entire affair. Doubleday, the publishers have said that they accept the manuscript as is, giving responsibility to the author and assuming in good faith that it was written as recollected by the author. And James Frey himself is saying the Emotional Truth is what is the most important thing here.

It would seem that slowly, ever so slowly, the mentality of reality television where things are carefully prepared and then staged as truth is beginning to take hold in literature as well.

The thing that really knocks me on the head is that I should be agreeing with this stuff. I am, after all, an aspiring novelist. I’ve already written three very weighty books with not an ounce of historical fact to them, but plenty of what I think are emotional truths, so I definitely believe in the importance of something feeling right. Of something feeling like truth even if it didn’t actually happen.

What I find myself in violent disagreement with is the ability to create an emotional truth and then go on to incorporate that emotional truth into your own personal history, deliberately altering your own life and then positing that that this more dramatic, more emotional truth you have manufactured actually was your life, and is what people should accept, rather than what really happened.

It’s kind of like saying to all the middle class white kids who desperately want to be black, “Go on, tell people you killed someone and that you’ve been in jail for drive by shootings and drug trafficking, if that FEELS true to you, then it’s MORE true than something as boring as What Really Happened.”

I’m getting so full of thoughts about this whole situation that it is sorely tempting to me to just sit down and try to tell a story (Fiction, course, I want to be honest here) about truth, and how people twist it or reject when it proves to be inconvenient. It seems to be a side-effect of the abundance of information that rather than making it easier to find the truth, more information has hidden the truth.

Or, speaking metaphorically, truth is just one kind of plant in a forest of information, and we’re now wandering in California redwood territory, when truth just happens to be a beat up little pine tree like the Christmas tree on Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.

I’m wondering why, if it’s the emotional truth that counts, Frey didn’t just stick to his original presentation of the novel as fiction. I’m wondering why, as fiction it was rejected 17 times, and I’m wondering why, when it was finally accepted it was at the suggestion of the editor that it be changed from fiction to a “memoir.”

Why, if everyone is going on and on about how it’s the emotional truth that counts, is it still being pushed as a memoir? Why can’t it simply be a beautiful lie, like great fiction? Henry Miller, who is–unsurprisingly–a huge influence on James Frey, wrote The Tropic Of Cancer by combining elements of his own life with his imaginings, his thoughts, his opinions and his wishes. It was a hodge podge of reality, idea and emotion.

And it was marketed as fiction.

If Frey admired Miller so much for his integrity, his absolute refusal to compromise on anything, including his writing, then how could he have allowed himself to do what Miller would probably find to be the literary equivalent of blasphemy? How could he have done the one thing his idol would loathe?

He finally broke after 17 rejections. I’m going to tell myself the same won’t happen to me. But I have learned one important thing. If I want to get away with writing something really, stupendously outlandish, the kind of thing that defies all common sense, I should write it for the non-fiction crowd. Apparently fiction fans have a much sharper sense of believability than they do…