I can't believe I am doing this, but I just have to get into the James Frey fray. I can see how a reader could say, "It makes no difference to me whether it was true or not, it just 'felt true' to me, it moved me, and I liked the book anyway."
It's time to think twice about that perspective, however, because of the opposite view: "I'm not going to believe that memoir, nothing in my experience has been like that, he must be lying." (Did you hear it was OK to lie in memoirs now? Oprah said so.) This detracts from the credibility of every other memoir ever published. Yes, the line between fact and fiction must be defined strictly. If a memoir could be either, then it shouldn't be its own category. As someone has said, all good books are memoirs.
Unknowingly or serendipitously or brilliantly or however you want to look at it, Oprah has chosen a prime -- and honest -- memoirist as her next memoir author: Elie Wiesel. We'd never want to hear someone say, "that didn't really happen" about Elie Wiesel's memoir about the Holocaust, "Night". Wiesel is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and started a foundation that gives an ethics prize.
The two memoirists clearly don't belong in the same category.
In case you've been living under a rock, Oprah retracted her support and Frey admitted on her show that he lied. There's a sticker on the book now saying it's all lies. But it's still on the NYT non-fiction list...
Posted by: Iz | February 04, 2006 at 07:51 AM