Sunday, January 15, 2006

James Frey's emotional capital

Oh, the hullabaloo surrounding The Smoking Gun's investigation into the "facts" of James Frey's claims about his Criminal past.

Anyone who reads memoir knows that the point is often not what happened on which date to whom and when but why it happened, how the narrator responds to the why, and what readers glean from that about living their own lives. Memoirs are not how-to manuals. They do not tell us how to live our lives. If you're a drug addict or an alcoholic or a criminal and you're looking to Frey's books for advice on how to live and what to do, you're not gonna get far, contrary to what Oprah tells you. If you're a drug addict or an alcoholic or a criminal, you're likely not reading Frey's book anyway.

Frey created a persona to tell his stories, a persona that is not reducible to James Frey the man. I finished both books, I felt like I knew him, I wanted to know more about him, but at the same time I understood that I was falling in love not with a real person but with a construction for the purposes of storytelling.

Last night I was reading essays out of a book called Feminism After Bourdieu. In "Gendering Bourdieu's Concepts of Capitals," Diane Reay argues that "emotional capital," is a capital unlike cultural, economic, or symbolic in that it is "all about investment in others rather than self--the capital that is used up in interaction with others and is for the benefit of those others" (71). She also writes that emotional capital "gained in the private sector lacks the direct convertibility of other capitals like cultural and economic capital" (60). First, cultural capital is never directly convertible, but more important to my point is that Frey's work challenges this notion of emotional capital not being subject to commodification in the same way that cultural capital is. Of course Frey's emotional capital is being commodified. We read his books because we want to know what it felt like to be a drug addict who couldn't have anesthesia during two root canals. We imagine what we would do in a similar situation. We thank goodness that we're not in that situation. And Frey's counting on that, on our lack of knowledge of what it feels like to experience the extremes he supposedly experienced. And if he didn't experience them exactly the way his book claims that he did?

Memoir is not the Truth with a capital T. Writing about the self is never the Truth. Emotional truth, what it felt like to be me, to paraphrase Joan Didion, that's what matters.

Perhaps the reason so many people might feel duped is that they expect that Frey's memoirs represent a transcript of his life during those years. That, my friends, that would likely be very deadly writing indeed. Writing is what you make of your experiences.

5 Comments:

At 2:20 PM, Blogger susansinclair said...

And yet...isn't this compounded by the Oprahfication effect? That memoir over the last several years has become Popular Reading Material, and therefore is being consumed in less, well, sophisticated ways. Does that make sense? I'm just plucking, here, but it's something I wondered about with May Sarton and her published "journals" that implied a certain a certain degree of transparency and accessibility. And I think crisis memoirs like Frey's do that , too.

Hmmmm.....

 
At 2:23 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I watched him on Oprah sometime last week....before all the "hullabaloo". Interview after iterview, follow-up afer follow-up of people on the brink. People he "saved". Oh, please. Inspired, maybe, helped them to identify, maybe. Saved? Uh,uh.I'm with ya on this one Amy. I wouldn't want to be him. Embellishments or not.

 
At 5:16 PM, Blogger susansinclair said...

Two long pieces in the NYTimes today--one by Mary Karr, who seems to be siding with the idea of "truth in memoir." Verrryy interesting.

 
At 11:29 PM, Blogger Michael Lasley said...

I'm torn on this one. On one hand, I don't get the big deal about it. I understand your argument, and I dont necessarily disagree. Then, again, there's the interview he did on the Today Show back in the day when he said that no embellishment whatsoever took place in the book.

It seems to me that when someone sets out to write a memoir they aren't expected to necessarily recount all of the details of their life with exactitude. But there does seem to be some sort of understanding between the reader and the writer that the writer is at least making a good faith effort to tell the most basic facts right. And when a three hour jail holding turns into a three month sentence in prison, well, it seems that the author is no longer all that concerned with the audience, the author is no longer holding up her or his end of the bargain.

That doesn't do away with the emotional effect the writer has on readers, and that effect isn't to be overlooked. But I also have serious questions about Frey's intentions to begin with. Before the book hit book shelves, his goal had less to do with helping people as much as it had to do with writing non-fiction in a way that he thought was more real than other popular writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace. This was way back before Oprah, and he caused quite a stink because at that time he was making his name by blasting other writers who had best-selling nonfiction books on the market. He wanted to write something that was more real. Which then turns out to be wrong about some things that are not just small details. If he doesn't get those things right, then is he really telling us what it feels like to be an addict and recovering addict? Or is he just trying to sell a book? Is he just cashing in because he can exaggerate?

I think that's a huge problem. Apparently I'm alone, aside from Mary Karr in the NYT, because his book still sits firmly atop the amazon bestseller list.

 
At 4:42 AM, Blogger aerobil said...

Mikey,

I didn't know about his early interviews where he claimed there was no embellishment, and I do agree that a 5-hour jail stint is NOT the same, emotionally, materially, etc, as a three-month jail stint, and there's not much he can do to make that one right. OF COURSE he's cashing in because he can exaggerate and believe that he'll get away with it.

I'm becoming more torn on this one, too. I also hadn't known about his blasting Wallace and Eggers.

And I'm imagining his goal was NEVER to help people, it was to publish and sell his books. The "helping" people came via Oprah's legitimation.

 

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