Is that the sun??

In honor of the 50+degree weather in January in New England, I chose to don a skirt for work today. This may sound like a simple thing, but I had to wake a few minutes early, shave both legs, find a pair of nylons with no runs, put them on, and dust off a pair of heels. The effort really paid off as colleagues commented on "how nice I looked" and "how put together I was today". Maybe I should feel a little insulted that most days I look less than put together, but since this is probably true, I just felt happy that my effort was noticed (and that my pantyhose weren't drooping, but that's unrelated).

I've been following the story of James Frey whose book Million Little Pieces was "exposed" on the Smoking Gun Web site as being less than true. The book is a memoir and recounts Frey's experiences as a drug addict and his recovery and ultimate redemption. The Smoking Gun got hold of documents that proved that Frey didn't spend 3 months in jail as he claimed in his book, but instead just a few days. And, it refutes some of the other pieces of his story. On his web site, Frey admits that he embellished and made some stuff up, but that this only comprises 5% of the content in the book. The big debate is "Does is matter that the story isn't entirely true?" It was labelled "memoir" by a publisher instead of fiction, and many will say that this is reflective of a market in which memoir/nonfiction sells much better than fiction. It was a great gamble by the publisher: Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club and the book was the #2 selling book of 2005 behind Harry Potter. So, should a memoir be as close to the truth as possible? It's funny, at work I run the library book group and our theme this school year is memoir. We have talked about this issue and it will come up again when we read one of the upcoming selections in which the author explains that she has written a memoir, but that she can't actually remember everything that happened since she kept no journal and has not been in touch with most of the "cast" of her story. Is this okay? I don't think that it is, entirely. However, the idea that a book is a personal recollection of a time period or experience offers a certain leniency not given to a nonfiction book that writes of a historical event or era. And, who's to say that every historical nonfiction book is 100% accurate in what it reports? When telling a story, humans naturally exaggerate and embellish, to make the story a little bit better - why say that 2 foot fish was a mere 24 inches, why not 30, or even 36? What harm is there is 6 inches or an extra foot? I am not entirely defending Frey, because I think that when you choose to tell your story and base it in reality and explain that it is an accurate rendering of the events as they occurred, you should be as faithful to the telling as you can be. I think that a writer of memoir or nonfiction should resist the urge to make the story a little bit better. If you have a compelling enough story, that will be enough. If your story needs lots of little fictionalized details to make it better, there's a genre for that: fiction. Anyway, that's enough rambling about this for now. It's just a really interesting topic and I will continue to follow the story to see what the fall-out is.