Her memoir is an intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles as seen through the life of one household: a stern but loving black grandmother working two jobs; her two grandsons who quit school and became Bloods at ages 12 and 13; her two granddaughters, both born addicted to crack cocaine; and the author, a mixed-race white and Native American foster child who at age 8 came to live with them in their mostly black community. She ended up following her foster brothers into the gang, and it was only when a high school teacher urged her to apply to college that Ms. Jones even began to consider her future.14
The following week this personal biography was exposed as a hoax, the publisher, Riverhead, recalled the book and offered refunds to purchasers, and the editor and publisher said they had never met the author prior to publication, relying instead on the word of a literary agent and the author’s signed statement that she was telling the truth.
Margaret Seltzer, it turned out, had grown up with her biological family in the wealthy L.A. neighborhood of Sherman Oaks and attended Campbell Hall, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. When interviewed on the radio in connection with book promotions, Seltzer/Jones had spoken in an African-American vernacular, although she and her family are white. The publisher, editor, agent, and newspaper profiler all faced public criticism, and the press drew the expected comparisons with other hoax authors: James Frey, who fabricated the story of his supposed memoir of drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (powerfully promoted by Oprah Winfrey), and Laura Albert, the real author behind the memoirist “J. T. LeRoy,” whose invented personal narrative described him as an addict and the son of a West Virginia prostitute. Albert went to the extreme length of having someone impersonate “LeRoy” in public, confessed to the hoax in a Paris Review interview in 2006, and was successfully sued for damages. A movie contract made with “LeRoy” was found by the courts to be null and void.
More than one commentator, including the novelist Anne Bernays, asked why Selzer didn’t just forthrightly declare her work fiction. Bernays wrote a letter to the editor of the Times:
It’s clear that Margaret Seltzer, author of “Love and Consequences,” is a gifted writer with a soaring imagination. It seems perverse, then, that she chooses to deny her destiny as a novelist.
Ms. Seltzer’s insistence that only nonfiction can “make people understand the conditions that people live in” is way off the mark.
Has she never read Charles Dickens—or even Jane Austen?15
It’s tempting to reflect on Seltzer’s title, since Love and Consequences obliquely echoes “Truth or Consequences,” the name of a long-running American quiz show. “Love” rather than “truth”; “and” rather than “or.” Is this the contemporary fantasy of “having it all,” with no repercussions? Or an example of Freud’s dictum about dreams: there is no no in the unconscious?
Novel Histories
James Frey had written a memoir that turned out to be a fiction. In his op-ed piece for The New York Times Daniel Mendelsohn, citing Frey as the standard for contemporary authorial deception, described Frey’s book as a “novel—er, memoir.”16 Mendelsohn’s phrase may remind us of how oral written speech has become; this slip of the tongue that is not a slip of the tongue playfully performs the act of false naming that, on a far more serious scale, Mendelsohn was determined to expose and condemn.
The early history of the novel in English, interestingly, could be described—if inelegantly—by a reverse formulation as “the memoir—er, novel.” The original title of the 1722 Defoe novel we call, for short, Moll Flanders, was The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders, &c.: who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years, besides her childhood, was twelve year a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother) twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent: written from her own memorandums.17 In other words, the claim of truth or reality was part of the publishers’ apparatus and, presumably, part of the appeal: written from her own memorandums. Moll’s story of suffering and redemption, even if it does not include cohabiting with wolves, seems to fit in rather nicely with the preferred narrative of the modern best-selling memoir. Yet Moll’s first-person narrative was written by a man, and one whose own personal adventures did not resemble hers.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (more properly The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe; of York, mariner: who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself: with an account how he was at last strangely deliver’d by pyrates in two volumes, written by himself, published in 1719) had likewise presented the author as editor of a “true” account: “The Editor,” Defoe wrote in his preface, “believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.”18
The first edition of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1740) credited him as the “editor” of what was presented as an authentic set of letters, with only names and places altered. Nothing else, it was claimed, was done to “disguise the Facts, marr the Reflections, and unnaturalize the Incidents.” As a result, what was offered to the public was “Pamela as Pamela wrote it, in her own Words, without Amputation, or Addition.”19 Here the claim to historical accuracy, coupled with the immediacy of the letters’ apparent composition (Pamela “breaks off” writing when interrupted, her tears fall on the page, etc.), created a form in which it became problematic to separate truth from fiction—or, as Michael McKeon describes it, “the epistemological status of Pamela is difficult to disentangle from that of Pamela—from her claims to, and her capacity for, credibility.” Since Pamela’s story was that of an attempted rape by a wealthy squire (“Mr. B.”) of a young female servant in his household, the plot is, and was, sensational enough to elicit accusations of licentiousness. The only side of the story we hear is Pamela’s: her account of her employer’s initial kindness, the attempted seduction, her imprisonment in his country house, the illegitimate child he had with a former lover. Pamela periodically talks about her writing supplies—her pens, paper, ink, and wax—especially when she is imprisoned and worries that her access to writing will be curtailed.
I don’t want to overemphasize the commonalities between the emergent-novel form of the eighteenth century and the resurgent real-life memoir of the twenty-first. But there are some striking connections. Richardson’s Pamela was modeled on the conduct books of the time, forerunners of today’s self-help manuals (and yesterday’s etiquette books). Like the memoir, these genres now appear with great regularity among weekly best sellers and are prominent in displays at airport bookstores and chain stores. By combining the risk of personal hazard with notions of virtuous conduct and putting both into the epistolary first person, Pamela anticipates some of the hardship tales of privation, suffering, addiction, or rescue that still captivate readers today.
False Memoirs and Literary Truth
The phrase false memoir has obvious analogies with the notion of false memories, or false memory syndrome, and repressed or recovered memory. Much has been written on this phenomenon, comparing such false allegations to the witch trials of past centuries and chronicling the capacity for abuse by psychotherapists and other counselors. Pursuing this analogy may well land us in the murky territory of writing as pathology or writing as therapy. Researchers like James Pennebaker have worked on the problem from the side of psychology;20 Freud and Breuer long ago called it abreaction, the liberation of repressed ideas by reviving and expressing them.
The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely “cathartic” effect if it is an adequate reaction—as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be “abreacted” almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the ad
equate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g., a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone.21
Catharsis, which means purgation in both a medical and a theatrical sense, was used at this foundational moment in psychotherapy as a way of describing a purgation of the emotions. Psychotherapy, in this sense, is theater performed for an audience of one.
When Freud abandoned his so-called seduction theory in favor of the idea that fantasy, not real experience, was at the heart of many patients’ accounts of child sexual abuse, he developed the theories about infantile sexuality that became central to psychoanalysis. As he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in a letter announcing his change of heart (“I no longer believe in my neurotica”), this decision was based partly on the unlikelihood that actual abuse was so widespread (“in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse”), but even more importantly, on the impossibility of distinguishing truth from fiction: “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.”22 Cathected with affect: that is, highly charged with emotion.
The unconscious, Freud says, has “no indications of reality,” so when a patient describes past events it is not possible from such internal evidence to distinguish between things that really happened and things that feel as if they happened. Indeed, these events have, we might say, “happened” psychically, even if they have no basis in external fact. This theory was controversial then, and it is certainly not less controversial now. But it is, as you can see, closely related to the phenomenon of the false memoir. And—even more directly—it is related to the larger question of creative writing, the literary imagination, and the use and abuse of literature. Indeed, the coincidental presence of the word abuse (borrowed from a celebrated translation of Nietzsche’s essay on history writing) offers a convenient hook or hinge. Is literature a use or an abuse? Is it caused by abuse?
Manifestly not all memoirs are alike. Many have become memorable—and indeed have become literature—because of their style at least as much as their content. Among these works are, for example, the Confessions of St. Augustine and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also more recent writing—say, the nonfiction of James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tobias Wolff, or Elie Wiesel. But rescuing the baby doesn’t mean bottling and selling the bathwater. The fact that something really happened isn’t any guarantee of its credibility in a piece of writing. And some of the most famous memoirs, of course, have been fictional, like John Cleland’s erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), better known as Fanny Hill.
The word memoir only gradually began to mean reminiscences (often in the plural, as in “writing one’s memoirs”) and then biography or autobiography; the original uses were more legal or official, related to the memo, or written account containing instructions or facts to be judged. So the memoir has moved, perhaps inexorably, from fact to narrative embellishment, from other to self. But what is this addiction for books about addiction—or gang warfare, or child abuse, or deprivation? Not surprisingly, this kind of personal privation and struggle has often had appeal, and not only in the twenty-first century. It is not enough to say we live in hard times. Nor have other literary genres skated lightly over pain, loss, illness, conflict, betrayal, murder, or untimely death: this is a fair catalog of some of the central incidents of Greek tragedy, early modern English drama, and many classic works of nineteenth-century fiction. But the memoir craze, like American Idol and reality television, makes everyone a hero. Pathos, once a key ingredient in the response to tragedy and lyric, is now evoked in and by the memoir, the personal story, “my” story even if, in written form, it is occasionally “as told to” someone else.
Cause and Effect
Which comes first, the life or the “life story,” the craft of life writing? To what extent is the shape of a life conditioned by our literary expectations about crises, turning points, growth, and change? “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences,” wrote Paul de Man, “but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”23
This is true for “high” or “literary” versions of autobiography (de Man is thinking about Rousseau, St. Augustine, and Wordsworth), but it is equally relevant to popular and celebrity accounts. How did the great man or great woman—or these days the representative, proudly “ordinary” man or woman—become him- or herself? The dramatic or literary arc is already in place: early life, setbacks, signs of genius, promise, or unusual attainment, sundering from fellows or family, the first professional break or breakthrough, a triumph, a tragedy, reflections, recriminations, late style, etc.
The modern autobiography is occasionally written by the subject but more often with (or, functionally, by) a writing partner or amanuensis. These partners are sometimes called ghostwriters, but there is a distinction to be made between the invisible ghostwriter and the credited collaborator, and down the line, these attributions of authorship have something to do with that elusive category of reality, or truth, in writing. Here are a few examples.
The New York Times best-seller-list description for Real Change, “by Newt Gingrich with Vince Haley and Rick Tyler,” included Haley, Gingrich’s research director at the American Enterprise Institute, and Tyler, Gingrich’s director of media relations, as the book’s coauthors. On the Conservative Book Club website and on the book cover, however, Real Change is credited entirely to Gingrich, and the accompanying ad copy tells potential readers that in the book Newt Gingrich explains the role of the conservative majority. Whatever things may be real about Real Change, the claim of authorship is not prominent among them. Plus ça change.
Another book on the Times list that week, I Am America (and So Can You!), like the Gingrich book, bore on its cover a large photo of the credited author, Stephen Colbert, as well as a tagline send-up of book-promotion-speak as “From the Author of I Am America (and So Can You!)” The Times conscientiously listed Colbert’s coauthors from his television show, The Colbert Report, describing I Am America as “by Stephen Colbert, Richard Dahm, Paul Dinello, Allison Silverman et al.” But none of these names appears on the book cover. By contrast, the book jacket of another cowritten work on the list, Send Yourself Roses “by Kathleen Turner with Gloria Feldt,” declares straightforwardly, in reasonable-sized print, that the book, the biography-memoir of the actress, was written “in collaboration with Gloria Feldt.”
Authorship may not seem to be one of the key reality principles so much as a matter of truth in packaging. Nonetheless, for the time being, let’s note that these nonfiction books are jostling for public favor with books described as memoirs, autobiographies, meditations, or spectacularly—and unexpectedly—posthumous accounts. The attraction of these real-life narratives and their “ripped from the headlines” appeal seems undeniable, a symptom of the times (and the Times). Thus, on the same best-seller list, we find:
Manic by Terri Cheney. A memoir of life with bipolar disorder.
Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge. A memoir of foster care by an advocate for poor children.
Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. The only survivor of a Navy Seals operation in northern Afghanistan describes the battle, his comrades, and his courageous escape.
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead by David Shields. A meditation on mortality, focused on the author’s ninety-seven-year-old father.
Reconciliation by Benazir Bhutto. A posthumous look at Islam, democracy, and the West, by Pakistan’s former prime minister and assassinated opposition leader.24
Presumably,
considerations of space in this last item produced the verbal compression “a posthumous look,” suggesting that Bhutto is writing after her own death—a development that would have made her the literal ghostwriter of her own book.
What might be the use of such personal accounts of the self? Let’s recall Philip Sidney’s dictum: “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example.” We might likewise note that a bad example has as much force to teach as a good example. The good example is a model for conduct, in the mode of Plutarch’s Lives or the lives of the saints, where allegory displaces mimesis and acts are symbolic in the first instance, real only—or preeminently—in their power to induce imitation. In a more modern sense, this is the Profiles in Courage, ordinary-hero snapshot, the inspirational feature story writ large. The obverse is schadenfreude, or the bad example. Triumphs over adversity, addiction (drugs, alcohol, sex, fame, chronic lying, you name it). It doesn’t take much to see that this is itself a seductive mode. If St. Augustine—or Rousseau—had had nothing to confess, would we read their memoirs?
Under a strict definition of literature, few if any of these memoirs, real or false, would qualify. Conceivably, if any had surpassing literary merit—however we were to determine that elusive criterion—it might somehow transcend the dialectic of truth and lie. But faked and false and lie and wholesale fabrication are damning terms when the public is deceived and not delighted.
Fact into Fiction
The best-selling book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (Free Press, 2002) was made into a successful film entitled 21 in 2008. The book, by Ben Mezrich, was listed as a work of nonfiction, and he went on to produce other books in the same vein with similarly explanatory subtitles: Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions (2005), Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees (2005), and Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai (2007).25 (Are we sensing a pattern here?)
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 23