As a reader, particularly an avid reader of memoirs, I try to take memoirs with a grain of salt. In my opinion, even ones that have not been subjected to controversy are not going to be 100% factual because it's just one person's perception of the experience. It reminds me of the old saying, "There's 3 sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth." I actually stumbled upon A Million Little Pieces in my teenage years. It was after it had already been published, and could have even been after the controversy but I didn't know about it at the time. I read and enjoyed the book, and found out about the scandal years later. Did it make me suddenly hate the book that I had enjoyed? Not really. The quote from the New Yorker article sums it up pretty well, “A Million Little Pieces tries to capture the experience of recovering from addiction. Readers don’t care whether these things literally happened to James Frey, because they didn’t buy the book to find out about James Frey. They bought it to learn about addiction and recovery. James Frey’s job as a writer is only to convey that experience" (Menand, 2018).
The ethics of publishing something as a work of non-fiction even though it is not all true is definitely questionable. In an ideal world, it would be nice if the authors put a disclaimer at the beginning of the book stating something about how some events or people may have been exaggerated for the sake of the story. But this could definitely affect the book's success if people know it's not 100% a true story. Is it better for a book to sell less but it's the author's own story? Or is it better to be successful only to be hit with controversy later? I guess that's a choice an author has to make for themselves. Ultimately, I think the readers themselves have to decide how much of a stake they want to place in the book's authenticity and how much they want it to affect them when there are controversies.
References:
Menand, L. (2020, December 7). Literary hoaxes and the ethics of authorship. New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/literary-hoaxes-and-the-ethics-of-authorship
Hi Liz! I haven't read A Million Little Pieces, but I have read Go Ask Alice. I was a middle schooler when I read it and I was intrigued by the fact that the book was by "Anonymous," which seemed to give it some validity in my young mind. Menand mentions that the copywrite for the book was held by a Mormon therapist and the book helped launch the war on drugs. I'm not sure if this therapist who held the copywrite was trying to scare people out of doing drugs (probably a good thing) or if he was living out some fantasy of his in a safe way (questionable, but not dangerous to anyone), but whatever the truth may be, the book stands as a good artifact of hoaxes and propoganda.
ReplyDeleteI am glad to see that I am not the only one who questions the validity of certain memoirs. On one hand, it's awesome for readers to feel as though they are sort of getting the "inside scoop" but at the same time, one does wonder how much is fluff....
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