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.