Calling a fictional book non-fiction. Does it matter?

Great Debates
1

I’ve been interested in the recent saga of James Frey and wondered about the ethics and consequences of writing a book and saying it’s 100% true, then having someone point out that key parts of it are not only inaccurate, but made up whole from the cloth.
I’m referring to A Million Little Pieces

For a rundown of what this is about, see:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

The summary is: James Frey claims to be a recovered addict, who, in his drug addled life, was a real bad ass. He has stories in his book about getting into fights with the “Pigs”, having root canal with no anestesia (by force, one assumes) while in the care of a rehab clinic, feeling responsible for a train wreck that killed a high school friend that he had nothing to do with whatsoever, and the list goes on. Mafia connections, you name it.
The Smoking Gun went looking for his mug shot to put on their website and came across some of his arrest records, and found that first one story was false, then another. They claim that a large amount of his book is completely false.

He has claimed (to Oprah, who selected his book as a bookclub selection and rocketed it up the best seller list and others) that it is 100% true. Then he backpeddled some and admitted things like maybe he didn’t spend 3 months in county jail. Maybe it was more like 5 hours until he posted bail.

Anyway, the people who read it and post their opinons on Oprah’s website are of mixed opinon. Some thing he’s a fraud and should own up to his lying, and some are saying they want their money back. Others say “Who cares if it isn’t true? It’s a good read and it’s helped people hat have addiction issues.” Some recovering addicts are pissed because they feel he’s taking allocades where they aren’t deserved “Oh, look at all he went through”.

So I guess the point I’m debating is this: Does it matter that this work might be largely fictional? I think it does matter. If it were written as a novel, he might or might not have had the following he has now. I doubt if he would. What bothers me is that he’s made millions off his supposedly true account that looks like it’s false. It bothers me that families of addicts bought this book thinking it told of a man’s true recovery, when now it’s difficult to tell what, if any of it is true. A lot of people paid good money for it and put their faith in him, right or wrong, and the rug has been pulled out from under them. And this guy is living in a multimillion dollar apartment in Manhattan laughing all the way to the bank. What consequences should he face for this? A smear to his reputation or more? Nothing at all?

Thoughts?

2

Certainly it matters, especially with things that might influence people strongly. There’s been a lot of ink (and electrons) spilled ove how accurate Carlos Castaneda was (not very, from what I’ve read) and whether that’s important (I agree with tyhose who say “yes”).

“T. Lobsang Rampa” wrote The Third Eye and other works about Tibetan Mysticism because he was, after all, a Tibetan Lama. Only he wasn’t. He was a British electrician who’d never been to Tibet. (He later explained that he had been a Tibetan mystic who was reincarnated as a British electrician.) Anyone basing their paper on Tibetan mysticism on his works is liable to be disappointed.

Truth in packaging – it counts.

3

Obviously the falseness of the account matters for the critics who review the book and for anyone thinking of using it to counsel drug addicts, or for any other seirous purpose. But I can’t see any reason to go beyond that.

It was a book. Books are for entertainment and possibly also information. In any case, a reader buys a book in hopes that it will somehow delight and/or enlighten them. The task of deciding which books to buy clearly falls to each individual reader, and they need to sort out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I haven’t read A million Little Pieces, but everything I’ve seen on the subject suggests that it was a pretty sensationalist account. Would-be readers ought to have been suspicious.

(And I’m not moved by the fact that Oprah selected the book for her book club. Anyone who still relies on Oprah to choose their reading material gets exactly what they deserve.)

4

It matters a lot to me. I read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction. One of the criteria by which I judge fiction is how closely it resembles what I know about the real world and the people in it. Even in fantasy fiction, it’s important to me that what people feel and do and say resembles what real people would feel and do and say in the situation. How do I know what real people do? My own experience, of course, plus what others tell me, including authors of memoirs.

In addition, one of my primary reasons for reading non-fiction is to learn true things. I don’t expect non-fiction authors to get every fact right, but I think I have a reasonable expectation that they are not making the whole thing up.

5

Agreed- one of the big sticking points about this particular alleged fabrication is the treatment he received while in detox. He has stories in there about sex with other patients, being denied anestesia during root canal, all manner of allegations that people who work at the center in question (apparently by location it was easy to figure out which one he was referring to) said there is no WAY possible happened. What if it scares real addicts out of getting treatment? There could be consequences to his actions far beyond fooling a few million people out of thier money.

6

Well, I don’t know. I think it’s a hard issue and often depends on the issues of the case. I haven’t read this book, and I don’t know anything about it other than what’s in the other thread, but it seems like a case where it’s easy to condemn the author. If he really did try to sell the book as a novel, didn’t have any success, and then was able to sell it when he called it an autobiography, that almost seems like fraud.

However, there are often much more borderline calls. The movie Fargo has a blurb at its very beginning about being based on a true story, which is false. The Coen brothers apparently added that for aesthetic reasons, as they wanted the movie to have a gritty, true crime feel to it. Is that wrong?

And here’s an example I think is even harder to classify. I once read the book Black Boy by Richard Wright (best known for Native Son). It’s usually described as his autobiography, but it was written in a very novelistic manner. For instance, rather than summarizing conversations, Wright gives us the actual dialogue. Now, there’s no evidence (that I’m aware of) that anything in the book is false. But could he have actually remembered all those conversations verbatim, when they took place years earlier, including some when he was a very young child? I’m skeptical. So, for the sake of argument, if the gist of what he wrote was true, the conversations took place, and they basically went as Wright wrote them, but the dialogue in the book doesn’t always match what actually was said (in other words, Wright transcribed the dialogues to the best of his memory, and chose what words to use when he couldn’t remember what exactly was said), is that wrong? Does it move the book from non-fiction to fiction?

7

Yes, it matters- it’s called “lying”, and generally we consider that “wrong”.

8

I happen to think there is nothing wrong with this practise. When you are talking about a memoir, what exactly is non fiction anyway?

Do we have to audit Clinton’s discussions of his marital indiscretions from his latest book?

How about Mark Felt denying his role as Deep Throat in his 1979 memoir?

If you read Wesley Clark’s books, you get no sense of how much or why he pissed off his immediate superiors with his behavior at SACEUR, only that he thought he was doing the right thing and was a bit confused by their reactions to him. He knows both how much and why, but that’s not what his memoir is for is it?

I do not think the truth really matters much at all in a memoir. Credibility does. One cannot write a credible memoir about being the President of the United States unless one actually has been one, without it being a satire. But if somebody can write credibly, well, it’s to their credit!

I happen to prefer genuine fakers who can produce credible stories that affect people. That is good literature. I get a pang in my heart when Frodo gets struck down by Shelob and Sam carries on the quest even though they are a fictional character and even though I know Frodo survives and they reunite. So do people need events to be real in a book for them to be impactful? I would say they do not. They just have to believe in the weight of it and to feel a connection with the subject matter or the narrator.

9

Didn’t all the early great novels declare themselves to be absolutely true?
Like Treasure Island, Moby Dick, and Gulliver’s Travels.

10

We should sic Chuck Barris on Frey. He used to kill for the CIA, you know . . .

11

FWIW, Frey isn’t the only recently popular memoirist to have charges of falsehood brought up. Augusten Burroughs, author of Dry and Running with Scissors, has been slammed for the same thing.

The article I linked to makes a distinction I think is useful, between non-fiction and creative non-fiction. The former is fact-only, while the latter is fact-influenced but not exactly fiction. There are, I think, shades of grey, and it looks like Burroughs was a little more open with the amount of fudging going on than Frey was, probably to his credit. But the family he discusses in Scissors is nonetheless suing him for defamation. (Salon.com has a better story, but it’s pay-to-read.)

I guess, to me, it comes down to this: no, it’s not a nice thing to fill a book with lies and label it non-fiction. But I can’t get all that worked up about it, from a reader’s perspective. (People who feel defamed should have legal recourse, even if poor Richard III couldn’t go after Shakespeare.) I think there’s a huge grey area between A Million Little Pieces and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I’d hate to deprive the Coens of their ability to riff on genre conventions because lots of people are gullible.

It reminds me of the Milli Vanilli controversy. If you liked the music, why does it matter that the guys in the photo and the music video weren’t the ones making it? Of course, I realize that to many people it does matter, and I’m not arguing that it shouldn’t matter – what you find important is your own business. I don’t know that I’d support a lawsuit by readers offended by the misrepresentation, but I might be sympathetic to a boycott of the author’s future books.

12

In a “memoir” I think the difference between fact and fiction is merely coincidental. I don’t think memoirs are fact only. I think in light of this and other considerations, the distinctinon between fiction and non-fiction is superficial.

People just don’t like feeling duped [especially after they empathize with someone].

13

The main thing about it that bothers me, as alluded to by others, is the fact that this book is being held up by people in rehab as an example and exemplar of what can be done to get off the drugs. Worse, the author seems to be encouraging this usage.

This to me is the rough equivalent of me saying “Yes, I’m a cancer survivor, and I have firsthand experience that eating nothing but jellybeans and nachos for six months can cure metastisized bone cancer. Also, I got in a knife fight with a drunken doctor at the hospital when I tried to get conventional chemotherapy and I had to club him senseless with an IV stand.”

If it was being held up as an entertaining memoir instead of almost a self-help book I’d feel much less skeevy about it. Because it’s being used as a self-help book by some, I think the author has an ethical duty to come clean about the fictional status of the work.

14

A gal at my work recently read Frey’s book and was raving about it - it’d made her reconsider her opinions on addiction, opened her eyes to a new side of life, etc. I asked if it was fiction or real, she said real, so I assumed that meant a memoir. We talked about how authors of memoirs sometimes stray from the exact truth, but generally just to make the story hang together better and be more entertaining. A good memoir author would leave you with the correct impression of a situation even if some of the details aren’t right.

Later in the day I looked for reviews of the book, and found The Smoking Gun article (along with quite a few reviews panning the author’s style). At first I was like, “big deal, so he fudged the details”. But the more I read of the article the more I thought he’d crossed the line from artistic license into outright lying.

People have a reasonable expectation of reading the truth when they pick something out of the non-fiction section of a bookshop or library. It’s up to us to keep our bullshit-detectors switched on, but that doesn’t give non-fic writers license to just make stuff up out of nothing.

15

That’s about where I weigh in- exaggeration is one thing, but making stuff up entirely is another. The reason it matters with this book is that he actively bashes AA and other 12 step programs (based on his “experiences”) and makes the claim that addicts don’t have to have that kind of help to quit, they just need to “Hold on” (that’s his mantra). Now, I agree you should have your BS detector on at all times, but that’s yet another issue a lot of rehab counselors and recovered addicts have- spreading the idea that if you just “hold on”, you’ll get through and stop using drugs or drinking, no assistance required. It’s one thing to theorize that, but another to lie and say that’s exactly what you actually DID, when you likely did not.

I think if it were BS stories about sleeping with people he didn’t or owning stuff he didn’t have, it would play differently, but this book became an inspirational phenomenon for a lot of people, and they rightfully (IMHO) feel duped and stupid for giving him the sympathy and the allocades they did.

16

You’re right that some early novels were sold as “true histories” (Robinson Crusoe is a famous example) or otherwise believed to be true (epistlitory novels like Pamela), but your examples are wrong. Gulliver’s Travels was clearly satire, and the other two were not eary novels, and were never sold as anything but adventure novels.

17

For anyone who has no problem with publishing fiction as fact can I recommend the collected journalism of Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Patricia Smith, Janet Cooke and Jay Forman.

18

I don’t know if they have legal recourse, but I think the parents of the girl who died in the train/car collision aren’t too happy about Frey claiming that she was his best friend when in fact he hardly knew her, and that her death ruined his life. Not to mention the fact that his retcon sends the other victim of the accident down the memory hole.

19

If Frey is going to lose his shirt, it’s to an apparently top-notch rehab clinic that he libels in the book.

20

Would those of you who say “it’s entertainment” be as blaise if it was a newspaper who made stuff up? If ti’s non-fiction, it’s supposed to be true, it’s supposed to be a book we can use as a footnote, as a cite.

Interestingly, another hoax writer has turned up locally- one “J.T. LeRoy”.