I have been silent thus far regarding the Frey flap. You know I abhor liars who perpetrate their untruths upon unsuspecting readers. Frey is not alone in his guilt; I rather suspect that the agent and/or publisher may well have been complicit in this little duplicity as well. (“Did Nan Talese Lie to Oprah?” and “Publishers Say Fact-Checking Is Too Costly”) Plain and simple: today, memoirs sell better than novels. And there is always the convenience of blurred or selective memory, alternate realities where no two people see the same thing the same way, yadda yadda yadda. Convenient, of course, because there is some truth to it. In his autobiography, All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life, Loren Eiseley wrote:
In all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little of reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artist’s loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures, the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They have all been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist. Rather it is the use of the things extracted from their context in such a way that they have become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind.
Okay, but back to Frey — basic facts that one has not forgotten, like the length of one’s stay in a jail cell, or the method by which someone you know committed suicide (it’s hard to confuse a cutting with a hanging), should remain factual…unless you tell us it’s fiction. And no, you can’t hide under the covers of “creative nonfiction” either. The Writer magazine ran a piece titled “The Ethics of Creative Nonfiction” (December 2005) in which they interviewed ethicist Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. — here’s a snippet of what he had to say:
The term ‘memoir’ should be applied only to works that reflect the truth as best as the author can find it. This is not to suggest, of course, that it is impermissible to change the names of real people for the sake of protecting their identity; this may not only be ethically permissible but obligatory. What should be out of bounds, however, is intentionally leading the reader to believe that something happened that did not (or its converse).
Pardon me, folks, but isn’t this common sense? Common courtesy? Common decency?