The Trouble With Memoirs

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But there's no corresponding willingness on the part of readers to give up the quirky characters and vivid details and sexy twists and pleasing, rounded endings they're used to in fiction. To get those effects in nonfiction, writers sometimes cut corners--the factual kind. "If you want to have something that can be sold as based on a true story," Coffey says, "you're going to run into guys like James Frey who are embellishing with techniques that are considered a gift in fiction writing but apparently a sin in a memoir."

No wonder a panel of linguists chose truthiness--a word popularized by faux anchorman Stephen Colbert to mean "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true"--as 2005's word of the year. A Million Little Pieces is packed with truthiness the way Dunkin' Donuts' Latte Lite is packed with Splenda.

In defense of his book, Frey invoked the fundamentally subjective nature of the memoir. "It's an individual's perception," he said to King, "my recollection." And he's right. Any memoir is unavoidably filtered through the author's memory and feelings and the inherently impressionistic nature of any literary medium. But before we get lost in an epistemological fog, let's not forget that there's a difference between unavoidable distortions and willful deceptions. Some falsehoods come with the territory of the memoirist; others must be deliberately imported into it. That's a distinction that memoirist Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Cherry, is adamant about. "This is not rocket science," she says. "This is not like sexing a chicken. Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? I think the entire book is horse dookie. This guy has done for memoirs what Jayson Blair [the New York Times reporter who fabricated interviews] did for reporters. What would it have cost him to stick a label of fiction on it?"

Karr isn't the only memoir writer who's mad as hell. Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, says she has been losing sleep over it. "What he did is wrong on so many levels, and I'm outraged by it," she fumes. "He lied. Writing a memoir, especially one like he was supposed to have done--or one like I did--is a very personal thing. You sit down, and you write about your innermost feelings and your experiences, and you share them with your readers. When it succeeds, it's a very intimate exchange. For him to have just so baldly lied is horrifying and disgusting and disgraceful."

Walls is eloquent about the emotional cost of being honest on paper. Parts of The Glass Castle describe growing up desperately poor in West Virginia. "In school," she remembers, "I would go into the girls' bathroom and fish lunches out of the wastepaper basket. It was very, very embarrassing. It was something I had never told anybody." And both Walls and Karr vigorously maintain that nobody has been able to dispute the facts of their stories.