My
curiosity about how truth functions in writing is insatiable—so much so that
last year I wrote a blog
post about it. The blog starts with a question that has plagued me from the
moment I first came across it…here is me quoting myself:
“Taped to the refrigerator in my grandmother’s kitchen there
is a piece of paper marked with a question:
What is the truth of the matter?”
What is the truth of the matter?”
The first time I
saw it I remember thinking how appropriately deep it was for someone like her.
I thought about what it said about her as a person, and about the kinds of
people who would ask her about it, or try to answer it, and all the conclusions
I could draw about someone who would write a question like that on a piece of
paper and tape it to their refrigerator…but in the end the question only led to
more questions.
The contemporary literary
landscape has created a struggle for the working writer, who is torn between
the blurring lines of genre boundaries, and the traditional rules that have
been put in place to compartmentalize their forms. Historically, the rules of
writing have followed the black and white sensibility that a text must be
classified as is either factual or fictional…However, there exists today a
debate in the non-fiction community about whether truth and fact are always
identical, or if there exists a flexibility somewhere—an emotional truth that
can be separated from factual truth.
It is fair to state
that both poets and prose writers can reveal absolute truths about the human
condition and emotional exploration without the concern that any image,
character or action that is presented in their work is or is not
a recollection of fact or the authors’ organic fabrication. Conversely,
journalists are depended on to report the facts, unadulterated and wholly
(though they often don’t), and non-fiction writers—biographers, memoirists, and
essayists are under constant scrutiny—waiting, post-publication, to be
lambasted by readers for the slightest skew or embellishment. So is it fair to
say that these rules must be followed in order to create valid examples of
texts in each genre? Are novels based in truth less credible because the author
chose not to create an entirely fabricated world? Is the memoirist a fraud for
conveying an interpretation of his or her own memory that cannot be
corroborated?
I find this rigid
divide problematic, both as a reader and a writer. As a reader, I want to
believe that the author—regardless of genre or theme—is passionate about his or
her work, and this passion—if it is to be believed—must come from a place of
authority that should emanate from the work that has been created. This
authority would most likely stem from a place of personal experience…of
retrospection and recollection of a moment, a feeling, a place that has
affected the writer enough for it to become an inspiration for their work.
In 2006, Oprah
Winfrey chose James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces, as an
Oprah’s Book Club selection. Three months later, reports exposed parts of his
book as being exaggerated—most notably that his account of his 87day stint in
prison was no more than a few hours. In a live, on air interview, Oprah Winfrey
chastised Frey for his embellishments, saying "I feel duped, but more
importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers." It was a
literary event great enough to merit a re-evaluation of the terms of memoir
writing.
What the New York
Times coined as, “The Frey Effect” set off alarm bells for publishers and
agents alike, some of which had once encouraged authors to turn novels into
hot-selling memoirs. New York Literary Agent Christy Fletcher told the New York
Times, ''The decision to take on a memoir was always based on how good is the
writing and how good is the story, that's not enough any more.''
If a fact cannot be
corroborated on a work that is defined as non-fiction, does the “larger truth”
that in offered within the text lose it’s legitimacy as well? In the case of
James Frey, the line between aesthetic enhancement and outright fabrication was
not toed so much as sprinted over. But would the outrage of his readership been
as high if he had said he was in jail for 8 days instead of 87? And would the
entire message that comes out of A Million Little Pieces come undone
without including the narrative of a three-month stay in prison? The Frey
Effect is not a consequence of poor authorship, so much as improper
representation. If Oprah’s producers had done fact checking of their own, they
would have discovered that Frey had shopped the book out as both a novel and a
memoir prior to publication—a clear indication that the book was at least partially
fictive. Regardless of who is to blame for the misclassification, the fact that
the book had an audience at all is based on what Times book critic Michiko
Kakutani calls, ''a case about how much value contemporary culture places on
the very idea of truth.''
Our job as writers
is not to define truth for our readers, but for ourselves. We must accept the
fuzziness of our memories, and acknowledge that our perception of things is as
unique and personal as our own genetic code. I wrote once that these truths
that writers use in their work are “a repackaged retelling of what it means to
be human.” That each individual detail, no matter how unique, is just each
writers way of converting their truth into some universal truth…and I again
recalled the piece of paper taped to my grandmothers’ refrigerator door.
A few months ago I
sent her some pages of my retelling of her life, and the life I was living as I
wrote it. Along with the manuscript I attached a note that said, …what is the
truth of the matter? She responded, via voicemail, something that will most
assuredly make into the next set of pages:
“There is no such thing as truth. My truth is not your
truth. The truth is the seed that you put in the ground and it grows. Life has
no purpose; life is an experience. What you learn is through experiencing life,
your life, and that is what you write. That is the truth. That is life, and you
cannot stop it.”
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