An early version of this article was named a finalist in the 2006 Editor's Prize competition of the Missouri Review.
One year ago today Oprah Winfrey summoned James Frey to appear live on her Oprah television show to discuss revelations that he had lied about his personal history in writing his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. At first Winfrey had tried to dismiss the accusations against Frey– first made on January 8, 2006 in the on-line journal The Smoking Gun – even calling in to CNN’s Larry King Live show on January 11 to declare her faith in the “underlying message” of the book she had turned into a best-seller by making it the September, 2005 selection of her celebrated book club.
Now, two weeks later, she was withdrawing her blessing. If Frey thought this process would be painless, Winfrey disabused him of this notion quickly, renouncing her earlier defense of him in a devastating monologue and then turning on him as he sat stiff on her studio sofa. Conflating her own feelings with those of her viewers, she told Frey, “I feel that you conned us all.”
As did millions of others, I sat transfixed watching James Frey receive his oh-so-public scolding. My attention was riveted, though, for a very specific reason: my own work of non-fiction, Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death, was due for release the next month by Doubleday – the same division of Random House that published A Million Little Pieces. In my book I had blended history and memoir, taking the stories of dying people I had known in my work as a United Methodist pastor and casting them against the backdrop of an ancient Christian way of dying that earlier generations in both England and America called “the happy death.” The flame of James Frey’s on-air crash-and-burn seemed to cast my work in a new light, and I found myself squirming in a way that Frey – inexplicably – didn’t. Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death was about to go to press, and I couldn’t help but imagine what might happen if the stories I had written were to be investigated by The Smoking Gun. Were my memoirs going to be “Freyed”?
*****
On the face of it my methodology had been straight-forward. After recalling the memory of someone who died with dignity and grace, I opened an electronic file and jotted down my most vivid recollections of the person’s life and death. Over time I fleshed the story out, beginning first by looking through my pastoral archives for papers that might prove helpful – copies of the printed program distributed for the funeral; obituaries published in local newspapers; printed copies of the eulogies I had delivered; or notes I had jotted down after talking with family and friends. Next I checked my memory and archival records against the memories and knowledge of others. I contacted surviving family members by phone and e-mail and asked their help in reconstructing the events about which I was writing. I also compared notes with people I had worked with in caring for the dying person – other pastors, medical personnel, church staff.
If the process described above sounds neat and orderly, it does so only because I have chosen to make it sound that way. In fact I found the work of writing these stories to be messy and complex. Only in a few instances did I find a coherent archival record – my records were usually spotty. I often found it difficult – and in a few cases impossible – to track down the families and friends of the people I was writing about, and even apparently reliable sources were not always consistent with one another. At times even my own memory seemed uncertain: I was writing about some people who had died ten or fifteen years earlier; my relationships with others had spanned many years and I found my memories of them intermingled with the memories of other people I had known and loved. In short the sources for my memoirs were uneven and open to interpretation. My work became a mixture of inconsistent reportage and necessarily selective memory. Remembering and writing became one.
I understand well the limitations of the genre. No one remembers the past perfectly or completely, and most of us remember in ways that fit the larger – and usually self-serving – narrative patterns out of which we construct our own personal senses of self-understanding. Without doubt I fell prey to this temptation. And yet, as I surfed the edges of my memory, I felt in my gut that I was writing honestly about my past. My methods were nowhere near as rigorous as a reporter’s would have been, but I was not just making things up as I wrote. In fact my book is filled with passages that combine details I was able to verify with details I reconstructed from memory. In my own mind – after years of working on this project – I now find it difficult to untangle the two.
Reading over the bound galley of Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death on that day of James Frey’s implosion, I felt reassured: I had exercised much greater self-control in writing my book than did James Frey in writing A Million Little Pieces. Frey did not merely do a poor job of remembering; he willfully, intentionally made things up – big things, things that stood at the core of his story. Frey succumbed to the great temptation of the memoirist – he took the natural and inevitable limitations of the genre and he used them as a cover to alter and exaggerate what he knew to be the facts in order to heighten the dramatic impact of his story. To cite just the most egregious example, he did not spend 87 days in jail, but only a few hours. By lying about himself and about what in fact he truly remembered, he laid waste to the very foundation of good memoir.
Still, on that day of his public whipping, I found myself sympathizing with James Frey. A few months earlier – somewhere in the midst of endlessly re-writing Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death – I had come across a quote from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The quote had made me laugh and I had taped it immediately to the top of my laptop. “It’s easy to write one’s memoirs,” Schnitzler said, “when one has a terrible memory.”
*****
Oprah Winfrey was in no laughing mood on the day she fried James Frey on her nationally-televised hot-seat. Her defense of Frey on Larry King Live had caused her great embarrassment and she was unequivocal in retracting it: “I regret that phone call,” she said, “ … and so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth: you are absolutely right.” In tones of righteous indignation she extracted from Frey admissions of guilt to The Smoking Gun’s accusations.
Across the hour-long program, Winfrey’s many guests joined her in taking James Frey to task. Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist, counseled publishers to hire fact-checkers, suggesting that someone at Doubleday “could have done what The Smoking Gun did” before A Million Little Pieces went to press. The New York Times’ Frank Rich suggested Frey’s dissembling was just “the tip of the iceberg” in a culture dominated by corporate tax evasion and government spin and reality-based television – a culture in which “anyone can sort of put something out that sort of looks true, smells a little bit like truth but, in fact, is in some way fictionalized.” And Roy Peter Clark, journalism professor at the Poynter Institute, quoted Frey himself – who wrote in A Million Little Pieces, “Remember the truth. It’s all that matters.” Clark observed, “That’s such a powerful, powerful statement in addiction, in recovery, in journalism, in race relations, and personal relations.”
All this makes so much sense … and yet I find myself wanting to protest. The art of writing memoir is fundamentally different from that of reporting the news or even writing history. Memoirists are not reporters “embedded” in their own experience, and when they write after-the-fact about that experience they should not aspire to become historians investigating their own past. Memoirists should be expected to lose their objectivity, sometimes in large measure – this lack of objectivity is at times precisely what gives the art of memoir such poignancy and power. The trick to this kind of writing is to write in a spirit of humility, to write in a way that acknowledges the limits of one’s own self-perception. When they write in this spirit, memoirists invite their readers to join them in a journey of self-discovery, they take their readers with them as they uncover greater understandings of what has happened in their pasts, including those parts of their pasts – the interior, the emotional, the spiritual, the subjective – that would be impossible for the best reporter or best historian to pin down. This is the beauty of writing memoir: when we reflect in writing on our own pasts we are challenged to write in search of truths that cannot be fact-checked.
Of course my protestations are not inconsistent with the recommendations of the experts on Oprah’s panel. In writing their own life-stories writers can be more careful and honest and forthright in recounting what they know to have taken place, and they can more clearly acknowledge the limits of what they remember. Agents and editors can be more cautious about choosing to represent and publish what they do. And publishers can make sure that book titles, subtitles and front matter make clear what kind of work is being published, hiring fact-checkers if something asserted to be factual seems too over the top.
Many people have stepped up efforts like these in the aftermath of the Frey fiasco, and this can only be for the good. Still, looking back on the whole debacle one year later, I find myself worried about the fate of the memoir. Frey’s notoriety has cast shadows of doubt on an entire genre of literature, and his critics have left the impression that the remedy is for memoirists to simply “tell the truth.” My experience is that things are much more complicated than this counsel would make them seem. I can forswear outright lies and renounce fabrications by design, but I will still face difficult choices in my efforts to write truthful memoir.
I worry that we, who are writers of memoir, are now expected to write only what we have contemporaneously documented, or can demonstrably prove, or can remember with crystal clarity. And I worry that we are now expected to apologize continually for our limited powers of recall, or to litter our works with notes of reservation and qualification. I worry, in short, that have allowed the art of writing good memoir to be forever “Freyed” in the fat of journalists’ expectations.
If we allow these expectations to prevail we will suffer a number of costly consequences. First, our writings will prove uninteresting and uninspired, not to mention very short. Second, the rhythm and beauty of the stories we tell will be greatly undermined. Finally, and most costly of all, we will all miss out on those deeper truths that can be served only when honest writers set out to explore honestly their own flawed memories.
One year ago today Oprah Winfrey summoned James Frey to appear live on her Oprah television show to discuss revelations that he had lied about his personal history in writing his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. At first Winfrey had tried to dismiss the accusations against Frey– first made on January 8, 2006 in the on-line journal The Smoking Gun – even calling in to CNN’s Larry King Live show on January 11 to declare her faith in the “underlying message” of the book she had turned into a best-seller by making it the September, 2005 selection of her celebrated book club.
Now, two weeks later, she was withdrawing her blessing. If Frey thought this process would be painless, Winfrey disabused him of this notion quickly, renouncing her earlier defense of him in a devastating monologue and then turning on him as he sat stiff on her studio sofa. Conflating her own feelings with those of her viewers, she told Frey, “I feel that you conned us all.”
As did millions of others, I sat transfixed watching James Frey receive his oh-so-public scolding. My attention was riveted, though, for a very specific reason: my own work of non-fiction, Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death, was due for release the next month by Doubleday – the same division of Random House that published A Million Little Pieces. In my book I had blended history and memoir, taking the stories of dying people I had known in my work as a United Methodist pastor and casting them against the backdrop of an ancient Christian way of dying that earlier generations in both England and America called “the happy death.” The flame of James Frey’s on-air crash-and-burn seemed to cast my work in a new light, and I found myself squirming in a way that Frey – inexplicably – didn’t. Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death was about to go to press, and I couldn’t help but imagine what might happen if the stories I had written were to be investigated by The Smoking Gun. Were my memoirs going to be “Freyed”?
*****
On the face of it my methodology had been straight-forward. After recalling the memory of someone who died with dignity and grace, I opened an electronic file and jotted down my most vivid recollections of the person’s life and death. Over time I fleshed the story out, beginning first by looking through my pastoral archives for papers that might prove helpful – copies of the printed program distributed for the funeral; obituaries published in local newspapers; printed copies of the eulogies I had delivered; or notes I had jotted down after talking with family and friends. Next I checked my memory and archival records against the memories and knowledge of others. I contacted surviving family members by phone and e-mail and asked their help in reconstructing the events about which I was writing. I also compared notes with people I had worked with in caring for the dying person – other pastors, medical personnel, church staff.
If the process described above sounds neat and orderly, it does so only because I have chosen to make it sound that way. In fact I found the work of writing these stories to be messy and complex. Only in a few instances did I find a coherent archival record – my records were usually spotty. I often found it difficult – and in a few cases impossible – to track down the families and friends of the people I was writing about, and even apparently reliable sources were not always consistent with one another. At times even my own memory seemed uncertain: I was writing about some people who had died ten or fifteen years earlier; my relationships with others had spanned many years and I found my memories of them intermingled with the memories of other people I had known and loved. In short the sources for my memoirs were uneven and open to interpretation. My work became a mixture of inconsistent reportage and necessarily selective memory. Remembering and writing became one.
I understand well the limitations of the genre. No one remembers the past perfectly or completely, and most of us remember in ways that fit the larger – and usually self-serving – narrative patterns out of which we construct our own personal senses of self-understanding. Without doubt I fell prey to this temptation. And yet, as I surfed the edges of my memory, I felt in my gut that I was writing honestly about my past. My methods were nowhere near as rigorous as a reporter’s would have been, but I was not just making things up as I wrote. In fact my book is filled with passages that combine details I was able to verify with details I reconstructed from memory. In my own mind – after years of working on this project – I now find it difficult to untangle the two.
Reading over the bound galley of Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death on that day of James Frey’s implosion, I felt reassured: I had exercised much greater self-control in writing my book than did James Frey in writing A Million Little Pieces. Frey did not merely do a poor job of remembering; he willfully, intentionally made things up – big things, things that stood at the core of his story. Frey succumbed to the great temptation of the memoirist – he took the natural and inevitable limitations of the genre and he used them as a cover to alter and exaggerate what he knew to be the facts in order to heighten the dramatic impact of his story. To cite just the most egregious example, he did not spend 87 days in jail, but only a few hours. By lying about himself and about what in fact he truly remembered, he laid waste to the very foundation of good memoir.
Still, on that day of his public whipping, I found myself sympathizing with James Frey. A few months earlier – somewhere in the midst of endlessly re-writing Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death – I had come across a quote from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The quote had made me laugh and I had taped it immediately to the top of my laptop. “It’s easy to write one’s memoirs,” Schnitzler said, “when one has a terrible memory.”
*****
Oprah Winfrey was in no laughing mood on the day she fried James Frey on her nationally-televised hot-seat. Her defense of Frey on Larry King Live had caused her great embarrassment and she was unequivocal in retracting it: “I regret that phone call,” she said, “ … and so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth: you are absolutely right.” In tones of righteous indignation she extracted from Frey admissions of guilt to The Smoking Gun’s accusations.
Across the hour-long program, Winfrey’s many guests joined her in taking James Frey to task. Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist, counseled publishers to hire fact-checkers, suggesting that someone at Doubleday “could have done what The Smoking Gun did” before A Million Little Pieces went to press. The New York Times’ Frank Rich suggested Frey’s dissembling was just “the tip of the iceberg” in a culture dominated by corporate tax evasion and government spin and reality-based television – a culture in which “anyone can sort of put something out that sort of looks true, smells a little bit like truth but, in fact, is in some way fictionalized.” And Roy Peter Clark, journalism professor at the Poynter Institute, quoted Frey himself – who wrote in A Million Little Pieces, “Remember the truth. It’s all that matters.” Clark observed, “That’s such a powerful, powerful statement in addiction, in recovery, in journalism, in race relations, and personal relations.”
All this makes so much sense … and yet I find myself wanting to protest. The art of writing memoir is fundamentally different from that of reporting the news or even writing history. Memoirists are not reporters “embedded” in their own experience, and when they write after-the-fact about that experience they should not aspire to become historians investigating their own past. Memoirists should be expected to lose their objectivity, sometimes in large measure – this lack of objectivity is at times precisely what gives the art of memoir such poignancy and power. The trick to this kind of writing is to write in a spirit of humility, to write in a way that acknowledges the limits of one’s own self-perception. When they write in this spirit, memoirists invite their readers to join them in a journey of self-discovery, they take their readers with them as they uncover greater understandings of what has happened in their pasts, including those parts of their pasts – the interior, the emotional, the spiritual, the subjective – that would be impossible for the best reporter or best historian to pin down. This is the beauty of writing memoir: when we reflect in writing on our own pasts we are challenged to write in search of truths that cannot be fact-checked.
Of course my protestations are not inconsistent with the recommendations of the experts on Oprah’s panel. In writing their own life-stories writers can be more careful and honest and forthright in recounting what they know to have taken place, and they can more clearly acknowledge the limits of what they remember. Agents and editors can be more cautious about choosing to represent and publish what they do. And publishers can make sure that book titles, subtitles and front matter make clear what kind of work is being published, hiring fact-checkers if something asserted to be factual seems too over the top.
Many people have stepped up efforts like these in the aftermath of the Frey fiasco, and this can only be for the good. Still, looking back on the whole debacle one year later, I find myself worried about the fate of the memoir. Frey’s notoriety has cast shadows of doubt on an entire genre of literature, and his critics have left the impression that the remedy is for memoirists to simply “tell the truth.” My experience is that things are much more complicated than this counsel would make them seem. I can forswear outright lies and renounce fabrications by design, but I will still face difficult choices in my efforts to write truthful memoir.
I worry that we, who are writers of memoir, are now expected to write only what we have contemporaneously documented, or can demonstrably prove, or can remember with crystal clarity. And I worry that we are now expected to apologize continually for our limited powers of recall, or to litter our works with notes of reservation and qualification. I worry, in short, that have allowed the art of writing good memoir to be forever “Freyed” in the fat of journalists’ expectations.
If we allow these expectations to prevail we will suffer a number of costly consequences. First, our writings will prove uninteresting and uninspired, not to mention very short. Second, the rhythm and beauty of the stories we tell will be greatly undermined. Finally, and most costly of all, we will all miss out on those deeper truths that can be served only when honest writers set out to explore honestly their own flawed memories.
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