NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Peggy Seltzer of Eugene, Oregon (penname Margaret B. Jones), has fessed up to The New York Times that Love and Consequences, her account of life in a foster home in Los Angeles running drugs with her black brothers, is fantasy. She admitted her story is a lie, after her sister, who’d read an article about her in the same paper, called the publisher and tattled.

This on the heels of author Misha Defonseca’s admission last week in the Boston Globe that "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years" (1997) which details her trek across Europe with a pack of wolves, is a fabrication; and, as The Australian tells us, the discovery of documents which disprove parts of Ishmael Beah’s bestselling account of his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, all add up to sad series of lies and deception.

What has brought this on?

You recall the debacle, where false facts in James Frey’sOprah-picked "memoir," A Million Little Pieces were outed by the Smoking Gun website? Frey at the time said he was having trouble selling his fiction project and so turned it into a memoir. Seltzer said the same thing. She faked the book because that was the only way anyone would "listen to it."

What an insult to the novel, that fabricators of ‘truth’ must now stoop to marketing their products as records of the real, instead of works of art. Don’t they realize that novelists have a much better shot at immortality? Why are they selling themselves short?

1) It’s easier to get memoirs published, those written by people with colourful, tragic backgrounds, than it is novels. 2) In today’s cultural environment ‘true’ stories are taken more seriously by consumers, and thus stand a better chance of inciting change.

In large part the media is laying blame for this spate of falsehood on the lack of fact checking by agents and publishers. They’re flaying the wrong goat. It’s not fact checking that’s to blame, it’s that publishers appear to be choosing the ‘real’ world over the imagination in a quest to maximize profits.

A lot of people eschew fiction because they feel that reading it is a waste of their time; it isn’t ‘useful, verifiable, factual, real;’ they don’t think they can learn anything valuable from fiction. They see it as frivolous diversion. We no longer depend on fiction to teach us truths. Instead the market demands "true crime" and "authentic" tales of love and loss. Look at the staggering popularity of ‘reality’ TV.

Fiction, because of its power to put the reader into the lives of others, to convey deep emotional turmoil and harmony, to illicit empathy, to ignite powerful feelings in the reader, is just as truthful as fact, and its impact often more profound. This power has precipitated major social change. Look at Dickens. Look at The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

All this fuss over fake memoirs is nonsense. Who cares if events didn’t happen just as they’re written; who cares if this character was a man in real life, not a woman, so long as the book is well written, tells a good story, engages the reader, provides a lesson, discusses an important issue, motivates action? What’s the big deal? Instead of lifting them from the shelves and wasting all that good paper, why don’t the publishers simply say, ‘We were misled. To the best of our knowledge what we were told was the truth; turns out this isn’t the case. Buy the book if you like, it still has worth, still contains an important message.’

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 8:54 AM and is filed under Authors and Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.