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Jan. 13, 2006
 
BOOKS: Frey’s Memoirs Join Others Whose Veracity is in Dispute
 
By Bob Hoover and Mackenzie Carpenter Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
"Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. "They are different from you and me."
 
In the world of books, the same can be said about the contemporary memoir. It's neither true nor false, but some of both.
 
As far as publishers are concerned, it doesn't matter as long as it sells and nobody sues them.
 
The latest in a long line of suspect autobiographies is James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," initially published in 2003 by Doubleday under its distinguished Nan Talese imprint. It was a shocking, explicit and vulgar account of his allegedly dissolute life.
 
When Oprah Winfrey picked the paperback version for her popular TV book club three months ago, sales -- and doubts about Frey's honesty -- zoomed. Thanks to Oprah's endorsement, "A Million Little Pieces" was the biggest selling paperback in the country between October and January. Among all books, it finished second to "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" in 2005 sales.
 
Smoldering doubts about Frey burst into flame Monday when the Web site The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) poked holes in many of Frey's lurid claims using police and court records and interviews.
 
Frey admitted fudging the truth to the Web site over the weekend, but he, Doubleday and Oprah's office continue to defend the book as true. None is elaborating further.
 
Frey's autobiography is another in a series of popular personal stories that have raised questions about their veracity. They range from Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" to Rick Bragg's "All Over but the Shouting."
 
Lauren Slater, whose first book was an account of her depression, "The Prozac Diaries," followed with "Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir" in which she admitted that she either couldn't or wouldn't include facts.
 
And that's a prevailing sentiment -- and problem.
 
"No book publisher has fact checkers the way journalists often think they should," said Thomas Lipscomb, founder of Times Books. "They simply can't afford it. ... They do a legal search, often a detailed one, to make sure they don't knowingly publish something libelous."
 
Like Slater, others have traded on sensational charges, such as adult incest by Kathryn Harrison ("The Kiss") to being sexually attacked by Bertrand Russell from Doris Grumbach ("The Pleasure of Their Company.")
 
"My take on this is that there is a national literary scandal that goes beyond this particular story," said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank, "and that basically it is to sell books. People who should be writing fiction are writing fiction under the guise of memoir or literary nonfiction."
 
It's a problem that extends across the media spectrum, he said.
 
"In the magazine world, to some extent, and in the book-publishing world, some authors are encouraged to trick it up. There's a culture of fabrication or narrative exaggeration with authors who are encouraged to make the writing more dramatic."
 
Novelist Gail Godwin had another view.
 
"You just have to do the best you can when you're remembering things about your life that happened a long time ago," Godwin said.
 
"There's bound to be some exaggeration or altering of things, facts, dates," she said, "but it helps to tell the readers that."
 
After publishing 12 novels, Godwin turned to writing memoirs, releasing her first of three volumes, "The Making of a Writer," this month.
 
"As a writer, your life is your material, whether it's a novel or a memoir," she said. "These days, there's a tendency for writers to make their lives seem worse than they are. Years ago, they'd try to make them sound better."
 
Godwin also said it was a lawyer at Random House, rather than an editor, who grilled her about the book's content. She suggested that the publisher's chief concern was libel, not accuracy.
 
Lipscomb said publishers routinely expect the writer to be responsible for a book's content, primarily because it "gives book publishers an opportunity to provide a platform for a wider variety of opinion than most other media, since once the publisher decides a writer can reach a commercially sustainable audience, it can leave the final responsibility for rectitude on the writer."
 
Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, seconded Lipscomb's comments.
 
"There ain't no such thing" as fact checkers, Gutkind said. "It's a system with no brakes. No one wants to do the hard work."
 
Authors of creative nonfiction will issue a disclaimer noting that names and locations of many characters and places involved in the story may have been changed for dramatic purposes.
 
"When I read a book of creative nonfiction, I know that certain situations are going to be manipulated," said Gutkind, noting that no such disclaimer was issued by Frey.
 
In the end, will this put a damper on the production of nonfiction memoirs and confessionals published in recent years?
 
Gutkind, who recently published his own contribution to the genre, "Forever Fat," a series of essays about his childhood in Pittsburgh, says no. "We are all trying harder to share our life stories with each other, and people are interested in reading them. These books do sell."
 
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.
 
Editor’s Note: A comment from Editor David M. Kinchen, who has been reviewing books since the 1960s and is the book critic for Huntington News Network: “I treat all memoirs as semi-factual. The best approach may be that of best-selling author Trevanian (Rodney W. Whitaker) who died at the age of 74 in December 2005. In his novel “The Crazyladies of Pearl Street” (Crown, 2005), reviewed for HNN (see archives), he calls what seems to be at least a semi-autobiographical memoir a ‘novel.’ I enjoyed Rick Braggs’ various memoirs and reviewed them favorably, but I wouldn’t want to vouch for all the facts. Perhaps the best approach is to treat memoirs as I treat Tony Kushner’s screenplay for the new movie ‘Munich.’: Loosely based on fact, with a lot of the author’s opinions thrown in, including his hatred of Israel. Don’t take this to the bank as fact.