(Note: This isn't my official class response for the week, but rather something I apparently needed to write before I could get to responding.)
Why isn’t the top story ever about how these publishers and editors failed to fact check their books? How the publishing industry lets these creations through the process? Why is no one decrying Penguin?
Why isn’t the top story ever about how these publishers and editors failed to fact check their books? How the publishing industry lets these creations through the process? Why is no one decrying Penguin?
And why can’t we send people like Frey, Mortenson, Janet Cooke, and others of their ilk on their way to the fiction world and let them be? The way we vilify these people, for the most part, seems excessive and vindictive to me. (In case of Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson not only made a myth of himself, but hurt other people and stole money, ultimately at the expense of children, which sends his deceit to a different league, obviously.) But Frey, the “classic” example of nonfiction betrayal exaggerated and fabricated his life story in what seems to be a bid for attention. And he got it. Boy, did he get it. Now he’s off in his fiction farm—another controversial project, which lends more to the theory that he’s out to get noticed more than anything—and we’re still, years later, talking about his stupid fake memoir.
Why aren’t writers invoking someone like Judith Miller, who helped push America into a full-blown war, in their criticisms and complaints about writers who manufacture? Why is the go-to leper Frey, who betrayed Oprah at worst?
I guess what I’m wondering is why we can’t just re-label books that turn out not to be true as “fiction” and let them be, most likely in bargain book boxes. The near-constant referral and warning and rehashing of these scandals hints at an insecurity in nonfiction to me: Writers of truth do their very best to separate themselves from people like Frey and Mortenson in what seems like an effort to further legitimize their own work—“We don’t accept this! We don’t lie!”—which is good and helps keep alive the contract with the reader, but it also strikes me as a little desperate, or even cheap. To throw a couple examples out there, every writing class I’ve ever taken has taken time to lambast Frey, and I’ve never seen Mary Karr not denigrate Frey in her talks, which is not only old news at this point, but snarky and defensive.
Maybe this is our way of acknowledging a black mark on the genre, a move similar to memoirs in a way—by acknowledging the actions we know to be bad, we’re somehow being more truthful. To clarify, writers sometimes denigrate themselves, share embarrassing stories, correct mistaken beliefs, in an effort to gain credibility with the reader. I think that’s what the genre is doing now. But just like in a constantly self-effacing memoir, it gets old. (At least to me.) And the fact that a revolutionary new nonfiction website (Byliner) was launched essentially looking backwards with a piece that focuses on deception shows we’re not quite over this need to establish ourselves in opposition to liars. (Is it the “non” in the name that encourages this?) Also of course, they probably wanted something splashy with big names to make a hit, and that’s just what they got, so good for them, I guess. I suppose I’m just lusting for a genre that talks about the things we do well rather than focusing on the few outliers who’ve messed with our public image.
You can do more than lust for such a genre—you can help recreate that genre.
ReplyDeleteThe defensiveness seems to owe in part, as you say, to legitimate writers wishing to separate themselves from the deceitful; it's less about a "desperate" or "cheap" move, I think, and more an attempt to clarify. I, for one, hope the debate doesn't go away, because I run into far too many prospective nonfiction writers—and even established "nonfiction" writers—who seem to think it's okay to do what people like Frey do. Not only that, they often seem to feel weirdly ENTITLED to the leeway, which I still haven't been able to understand. (w/r/t Frey, I'd argue that he wronged more than Oprah; he deceived millions of readers.) The issue has enough urgency that AWP decided to devote a panel to it (this coming February) called "What's Wrong with the Whole Truth?" (I'm on the panel, along with our pal Peter Trachtenberg and a few others. We plan to push for something you mentioned—greater fact checking in the publishing industry. Some nonfiction authors pay for their own fact checkers—this is the way to go, if publishers won't pay for it, and they won't.)
Byliner launched with Krakauer because he's a big name, yes, but also because no one had investigated Mortensen, at least journalistically. What's interesting to note is that Krakauer himself ran into similar accusations with some of his books—how he was able to take notes during those crippling Everest climbs, etc. All very good fodder for class discussions.