Opinion: Is Truth a Passing Fad?
Tell us what you think about memoir fakers
Last week, an embarrassed Tom Ashbrook told his radio listeners that he felt like an idiot. The host of WBUR’s On Point was Oprah, circa 2006, for a day, having been James Frey-ed by a young writer who claimed a gangbanger pedigree. Tom, I say, don’t be so hard on yourself. Reality ain’t what it used to be.
By now, Margaret Seltzer’s story has been well covered in the press. The debut author wrote an acclaimed memoir detailing her years as a white foster child in south-central Los Angeles and a drug runner for the notorious Bloods street gang. She further claimed to be half Native American, the ward of an African-American foster mother named Big Mom.
With a cocksure street accent, the 33-year-old Seltzer regaled Ashrook’s listeners with gangland tales. The New York Times lauded her, too, at least until the author was busted by her older sister (note to self: send sister Mandy overdue birthday present this week). Turns out Seltzer was never a foster child, never in a gang. Rather, she grew up with her all-white biological family in Sherman Oaks, a well-to-do LA suburb. Looking back, of course, Seltzer’s story seems outlandish, almost as outrageous as another recent bogus memoir, about a Holocaust survivor who took shelter with a family of wolves.
What’s going on here? Seltzer; Frey (rehab); JT LeRoy (truck-stop prostitute); Augusten Burroughs (crazy house); Ishmael Beah (child soldier). How can we explain the bumper crop of young semicredible authors seeming to represent a new genre of fictional nonfiction? On the other hand, why should we be surprised? Reality TV, the nightly choice of millions of Americans, is so highly edited that it could hardly be further from reality. The entertainment value of fake real life has never been higher, and the public is ever-more-hungry for real-life stories, the more extreme the better.
“It’s almost like when Truman Capote came out with In Cold Blood and mixed the genres,” says Meta Wagner, a lecturer at the College of Communication, who teaches memoir and personal essay. “They came up with the term literary nonfiction, or creative nonfiction. Maybe it’s time to come up with a new term.”
Artificial realism? Non nonfiction? I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-memoir?
In fact, the very notion of reality has been mutating for decades. For me, one of the first shifts came in the mid-’90s, when preripped jeans and distressed shirts with faded logos for skate shops or tattoo parlors began appearing in clothing stores. Suddenly, my threadbare Ts with cracked lettering and stories behind them lost their value. Experience was for sale — and it was priced to move. It may be true that what was real had always been less important than what was cool, but that truism had never been commoditized quite so brazenly.
The Internet, too, has not been good for the health of credibility. Suddenly, with just a few keystrokes, we could all become whatever kind of person we wanted — good-looking, perhaps, young, witty. At the same time, the Internet has put celebrity within everyone’s grasp, and not always for the most admirable reasons. A grainy sex-tape could make a celebrity of a spoiled heiress, and YouTube could put a school-yard brawler on millions of computer screens around the world.
As the line between fiction and nonfiction becomes increasingly hard to locate, it seems logical to wonder if anyone cares. After all, we get many of our civics lessons from fictionalized movies of historic events, and plenty would say we went to war over a false narrative of hidden WMDs. The means and the ends have been separated like conjoined twins. How much does accountability account for anymore? Search Google for the literary fraud James Frey and you get almost 700,000 results. His next book is due out in June.
No, reality ain’t what it used to be. The question is: does anyone really care?
Tell us what you think in the comment box below.
Caleb Daniloff can be reached at cdanilof@bu.edu.
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