changing my mind about Frey

It's the jail time lie that's doing it to me. SO MUCH of both memoirs hinges on the experiences Frey narrates about his time in jail; the first chapter or so of My Friend Leonard is really one big fat lie. For the first day of class tomorrow in my Advanced Exposition, which I'm devoting to the personal essay, I'm bringing in the first three pages of Leonard to initiate a discussion of the role of truth in memoir and the essay.

I argued earlier that it's the feeling of what happened that matters, but now I'd like to revise that to say that it depends on who you are and what kind of story you're telling. Here's the thing that convinced me, and it's something I've talked about a lot with students when we discuss autobiography. In The NY Times on Jan. 15, Randy Kennedy wrote this in reference to Casanova, Benevuto Cellini, Ben Franklin, Mark Twain and Thomas DeQuincey:

Of course, all these writers, except DeQuincey, had a special kind of raw material: their accomplished, celebrated and famous (or infamous) lives. This kept readers engaged, even if their facts got a little foggy.

In the case of Mr. Frey, however, and many others responsible for the flood of memoirs in recent years--Jennifer Lauck, who has written about her awful youth; Augusten Burroughs, who has written about his really awful youth; Dave Pelzer, who has written about his even more awful youth--their primary claims to readers' attention are the horrifying things they say really happened to them or that they really did.

The other argument that got me is the one about his selling it as fiction first. And when I think about it as fiction, I realize how very different the book would be, how I probably would've given up after a few pages. In fact, I'd probably never have picked it up. I just wouldn't have cared.

And while we're on this, here's an excerpt from an Oprah magazine editorial published at least four years ago (I came across it today reading up on the Jonathan Franzen debacle for my book). Oprah writes, "I have always been a truth seeker. Not a day goes by that I don't look for it, consider how I can use it to evolve into all that the Creator intended for me--and then seek to extend that truth to others."

Yup, I knew you'd love it.