The cover of the NYT Week in Review concerns James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces, embellished to the point of fraudulence. Randy Kennedy explores the relativist public response to the fakery, noting that suspicion of the memoir genre stretches back at least to Montaigne. Indeed, in the final chapter of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton U. Press), my friend and colleague David Yaffe comes to grips with the “hustle” of the jazz memoir, particularly the cases of Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Miles Davis.
The difference is that we care deeply about Mingus, Miles and Lady Day no matter what lies they tell in their books. As Kennedy points out, in the case of Frey and others hawking today’s “hard-knocks” memoirs, “[T]heir primary claims to readers’ attention are the horrifying things they say really happened to them or that they really did.” In other words, without his tell-all stories, Frey is essentially a nobody. Now his hucksterism has been exposed and his champions (Oprah, etc.) are suggesting that it doesn’t matter—that the emotional impact of the tale is still somehow real. Of course, no one wants to admit they’ve been had.
One commenter (“traveler”) at Freakonomics.com wrote: “Yes, addicts lie and embellish, but so does every author in order to make something you want to read and share and read again and talk about. Give credit where credit is due. The guy wrote, from memory and/or his creative wellspring, a really good book.” Indeed, every author wants to “make something you want to read.” But not all writers draw from a “creative wellspring” and deliberately withhold this fact from readers in order to sell books.
It’s a very different case, but on the back cover of Ilan Halevi’s A History of the Jews (Zed Books, 1987), Halevi is billed as “a Jewish author who has written several books about the Middle East.” He is in fact a high-ranking member of the PLO (and, strangely enough, Jewish). I was assigned the book in a graduate seminar in the mid ’90s. Our professor never informed us of Halevi’s partisan affiliation (perhaps he was unaware of it himself).
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