Friday, January 27, 2006
Freyed
Did everyone see Oprah bring out the frowny face yesterday for her full-on chastisement of fake memoir writer and book club whore James Frey? It was pretty ugly stuff, frankly. She didn't even get this upset with Tom Cruise tried to kill her. First she told him off herself and then she brought in a bunch of her weird friends to do it; by the end of the episode I felt like he was ready to confess that he had in fact never used anything stronger than Benadryl and that he had pieced together his book based on a brief interview with Keith Richards and several old episodes of She's the Sheriff. It was like Literary Smackdown! I think she should really make it a recurring series.
I have to say, though, I'm sort of enjoying this is a weird way. You see, for years I've kind of felt like writers ought to be in the business of, um, creating, instead of simply chronicling the wonderfulness of their own bizarre and fucked up lives on the page. Because to me the purpose of reading, rather than simply sitting down with a classic episode of The Simple Life, is that you're enjoying something that has been wholly imagined rather than simply documented. Shouldn't we be bothered that, as a nation, the "literature" that draws us in is that which recounts the true-life adventures of whatever meth addict/amputee/troglodyte is in fashion this week? And while, yes, lying is bad, if we're all this incensed that James Frey wasn't as much of a fuck-up as he claims to have been in his book, couldn't it be that maybe we weren't as completely overwhelmed by his art and artistry as we once claimed?
I don't think William Faulkner ever had this problem. No one was worried about whether he was actually an idiot gelding. People never faulted Virginia Woolf for not being as dark and weird as her writing made her seem. That's because they wrote fiction, and were proud of it. They weren't selling their life stories (as totally fascinating and scary as those may have been), they were selling their art. Or, correction, they really weren't selling at all.
Somebody's totally getting kicked out of the book club.
Did everyone see Oprah bring out the frowny face yesterday for her full-on chastisement of fake memoir writer and book club whore James Frey? It was pretty ugly stuff, frankly. She didn't even get this upset with Tom Cruise tried to kill her. First she told him off herself and then she brought in a bunch of her weird friends to do it; by the end of the episode I felt like he was ready to confess that he had in fact never used anything stronger than Benadryl and that he had pieced together his book based on a brief interview with Keith Richards and several old episodes of She's the Sheriff. It was like Literary Smackdown! I think she should really make it a recurring series.
I have to say, though, I'm sort of enjoying this is a weird way. You see, for years I've kind of felt like writers ought to be in the business of, um, creating, instead of simply chronicling the wonderfulness of their own bizarre and fucked up lives on the page. Because to me the purpose of reading, rather than simply sitting down with a classic episode of The Simple Life, is that you're enjoying something that has been wholly imagined rather than simply documented. Shouldn't we be bothered that, as a nation, the "literature" that draws us in is that which recounts the true-life adventures of whatever meth addict/amputee/troglodyte is in fashion this week? And while, yes, lying is bad, if we're all this incensed that James Frey wasn't as much of a fuck-up as he claims to have been in his book, couldn't it be that maybe we weren't as completely overwhelmed by his art and artistry as we once claimed?
I don't think William Faulkner ever had this problem. No one was worried about whether he was actually an idiot gelding. People never faulted Virginia Woolf for not being as dark and weird as her writing made her seem. That's because they wrote fiction, and were proud of it. They weren't selling their life stories (as totally fascinating and scary as those may have been), they were selling their art. Or, correction, they really weren't selling at all.
Somebody's totally getting kicked out of the book club.
