The story of “Archy Moore” anticipates the present-day willingness to accept, as valid works of social or political witness, autobiographical narratives that turn out to be works of fiction. In the preface that Frey was obliged to add after the extent of his fictionalization in A Million Little Pieces created an outcry, he writes, “I hope these revelations will not alter [readers’] faith in the book’s central message—that drug addiction and alcoholism can be overcome, and there is always a path to redemption if you fight to find one.” After the publication, in 1983, of Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir describing government atrocities against indigenous Guatemalans, investigations by a Middlebury College professor and by a reporter for The New York Times revealed that some of the incidents in the book hadn’t happened the way she described. (Among other things, a brother who Menchú said had died of starvation didn’t exist.) Menchú, who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, retorted that her book expressed a “larger truth” about the sufferings of her people. Yagoda reports that one sympathetic Wellesley College professor of Spanish—a modern-day Lydia Maria Child—declared, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that “whether her book is true or not, I don’t care.”
One of the most interesting defenses of memoirs that turn out to be “enhanced” or downright invented is that they accurately reflect a reality present not in the world itself (as in the cases of “Archy Moore” and Rigoberta Menchú) but in the author’s mind. This line of argument raises a question that goes to the heart of our assumptions about literature, about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and about truth, fiction, and reality itself.
At the beginning of 2008, critical and public irritation with memoirs reached a new peak, during a bewildering onslaught of phony-memoir revelations that were made within weeks of one another. There was Love and Consequences, a memoir of inner-city gang life by a mixed-race girl living with black gang members, which had been written by a white woman who had gone to a fancy prep school. And there was Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca, a Belgian woman who wrote about having survived the Holocaust by wandering around Europe with a pack of friendly wolves, but who turned out (a) not to have left Belgium and (b) not to be Jewish. In a statement published after the scandal broke, Defonseca declared, “The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality—it was my reality, my way of surviving.” (She added, “The truth is that I have always felt Jewish.”)
This justification of a literary fraud on the ground that it is true to the writer’s interior world—a world that helps the author “cope” or “survive”—strikingly echoes the self-defense offered by Frey. “People cope with adversity in many different ways,” he wrote in his published mea culpa, adding that his mistake had been “writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.” Behind such tortured psychological self-justification lies an aesthetic consideration familiar to anyone who has ever gone fishing: the experience Frey actually went through wasn’t nearly as compelling as the one he wrote down. “I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require,” he explained.
Such claims add up to a quite valid defense of a certain literary genre, but the genre in question isn’t memoir—it’s the novel. The novelist, after all, is a writer who has a vivid internal reality that wants expressing; who invents stories with dramatic arcs and tensions that point the reader toward a message; and who imagines himself or herself into the experiences of others in order to populate those stories with psychologically real characters.
The seemingly pervasive inability on the part of both authors and readers to distinguish “their” truth from the objective truth is nothing new in the history of modern literature; it goes right back to issues that were simmering away as both the memoir and the novel were emerging in their contemporary forms, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yagoda points out the curious fact that Daniel Defoe, the earliest major novelist in the English-language tradition, cast many of his novels as memoirs, thereby complicating a relationship that has remained vexed right up until the present. In 1719, a well-known author called Charles Gildon published a tract demonstrating that a popular book that claimed to be “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures” of an English mariner, and that came complete with an editor’s note (“neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it”), was a pack of lies. The mariner in question was Robinson Crusoe, and Gildon was, of course, right; like all novels, it was, in one sense, a pack of lies. And yet like all great novels it expresses something we know to be true.
But the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent “a truth” about life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent “the truth” about specific things that have happened. A generation after Defoe and a generation before Rousseau, the philosopher David Hume was pondering the difference between memoir and fiction—a difference that, ultimately, may have as much to do with readers as it does with writers. Yagoda cites a passage from A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) in which Hume compared the experience of a reader of what he called “romance” to that of a reader of “true history”:
The latter has a more lively conception of all the incidents. He enters deeper into the concerns of the persons: represents to himself their actions, and characters, and friendships, and enmities: he even goes so far as to form a notion of their features, and air, and person. While the former [the reader of novels], who gives no credit to the testimony of the author, has a more faint and languid conception of all these particulars; and except on account of the style and ingenuity of the composition, can receive little entertainment from it.
By “entertainment,” Hume meant intellectual stimulation and illumination—what we have been seeking from memoirs, in one way or another, since Saint Augustine. In this reading, memoir is a genre in which truth value is necessarily of greater importance than are aesthetic values.
Two and a half centuries later, in a reaction to the revelation that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, the 1995 account of the author’s experiences as a Latvian Jewish child experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust, was a fiction (the author was a Swiss Gentile whose real name was Bruno Grosjean), a Holocaust survivor named Ruth Klüger suggested that, precisely because it lacks truth value, a fraudulent memoir—particularly a fraudulent account of extreme trauma—could never amount to much more than a kind of perverse aesthetic experience, a trashy entertainment (in the more familiar sense of that word):
When it is revealed as a lie, as a presentation of invented suffering, it deteriorates to kitsch.… However valid it may be that much of this may have happened to other children, with the falling away of the authentic autobiographical aspect and without the guarantee of a living first-person narrator identical with the author, it merely becomes a dramatization that offers no illumination.
When readers defended Frey on the ground that his book, however falsified its “memories” were, had nonetheless (as he had hoped) provided them with the genuine uplift they were looking for, they were really defending fiction: an uplifting entertainment that can tell truths but cannot tell the truth.
A question that Yagoda never really explores is why, now in particular, there seems to be so much blurring between reality and fiction. (He doesn’t mention, for instance, the scandals involving fraudulent journalism—Stephen Glass at The New Republic and Jayson Blair at The New York Times—that erupted in the very period when similar scandals were staining the reputations of memoirists.) The answer to this question suggests why there is something distinctive about the current cycle of memoir proliferation and anti-memoir backlash.
For one thing, reality itself is a term that is rapidly being devalued. Take reality TV: on these shows, “real” people (that is, people who aren’t professional actors) are placed in artificial situations—they go on elaborately arranged dates, are abandoned on desert is
lands, have their ugly apartments redecorated, or are dumped into tanks of worms or scorpions—in order to provoke the “real” emotions that the audience tunes in to witness (disappointment, desire, joy, gratitude, terror, whatever). This craving on the part of audiences for real-life displays of increasingly extreme emotion (over, say, the carefully rehearsed displays of synthetic emotion that are provided to us when we go to the theater or to the movies) surely stems from the rise, in the 1970s, of talk shows whose hosts put ordinary people and their problems in the spotlight: first, Phil Donahue and, later, Sally Jessy Raphael and Montel Williams. Those TV shows helped create and promulgate the wider culture of self-discussion and self-exposure without which the recent flurry of memoir-writing and reading would be unthinkable. More important for the history of the memoir, they created a context for the huge popularity of Oprah Winfrey, who has used her show as a platform for people to tell—or, in the case of authors, to sell—their remarkable life stories; and who has, not coincidentally, fallen prey to more than one fraud. (In addition to Frey, Winfrey promoted what may be the strangest phony-memoir case of all: that of Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor who embellished his true story of survival in the camps with an invented, sentimental twist—his “angel,” a little girl who, he claimed, threw apples to him over the camp’s fence.) Winfrey’s susceptibility suggests how an immoderate yearning for stories that end satisfyingly—what William Dean Howells once described to Edith Wharton as the American taste for “a tragedy with a happy ending”—makes us vulnerable to frauds and con men peddling pat uplift. As Frey’s preface reminds us, the grander the dramatic arc, the likelier the tale is to be a tall one.
Winfrey’s—and, by extension, her audiences’—hunger for good stories at any price suggests, among other things, that the trauma-and-redemption memoir, with its strong narrative trajectory and straightforward themes, may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once-central position in literary culture. Indeed, shows like Winfrey’s, with their insistence on “real” emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than “dramatization without illumination.” If you can watch a real lonely suburban housewife yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary? More significant, the premium placed by these shows on the spontaneous expression of genuine and extreme emotions has justified setups that are all too obviously unreal—in a word, fictional. In a way, not only the spate of memoir hoaxes but the recent proliferation of what Yagoda calls “stuntlike” memoirs—narratives that result from highly improbable stimuli (“One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States”)—arise from a deeper confusion about where reality ends and where make-believe begins.
This awkward blurring of the real and the artificial both parallels and feeds off another significant confusion that characterizes contemporary life: that between private and public. The advent of cell phones has forced millions of people sitting in restaurants, reading on commuter trains, idling in waiting rooms, and attending the theater to become party to the most intimate details of other people’s lives—their breakups, the health of their portfolios, their psycho-therapeutic progress, their arguments with their bosses or boyfriends or parents. The advent of smartphones and other personal devices that enable us to talk to our friends, listen to our music, read our books, watch our movies, check our stock quotes and departure times, all while walking down a city street, literally allows us to create our own hermetic, private reality while passing through the (increasingly unnoticed) spaces of public life. It may be worth mentioning here that the word “idiot” comes from the Greek idiotês, from the word idios, “private”: an idiot is someone who acts in public as if they were still in private.
This experience of being constantly exposed to other people’s lives and life stories is matched only by the inexhaustible eagerness of people to tell their life stories—and not just on the phone. The Internet bears crucial witness to a factor that Yagoda mentions in his discussion of the explosion of memoirs in the seventeenth century, when changes in printing technology and paper production made publication possible on a greater scale than before: the way that advances in media and means of distribution can affect the evolution of the personal narrative. The greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the roles of both author and publisher.
So if we’re feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of personal narratives, it’s because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn’t to be found in bookstores. If anything, it’s hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers—the people at whom we can at least point an accusing finger when the old-fashioned kind of memoir betrays us.
Yagoda’s relentless and, it must be said, often amusing focus on the genre’s opportunistic low points obscures the fact that there are some very great memoirs. He devotes little space to masterpieces like The Education of Henry Adams, and merely mentions the titles of, but never discusses, Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and Vladimir Nabokov’s sublime Speak, Memory—a choice he wants to justify on the ground that his approach is “historical” rather than “aesthetic.” This odd tactic—a general study of the novel that failed to celebrate the great ones would give us very little sense of why we read novels—betrays an underlying prejudice of his own. Yagoda seems suspicious of the idea that intimate revelations can have motivations other than exhibitionism or “commercial enterprise.”
And yet sometimes memoir may be the only way to cover a subject effectively. Fifteen years ago, I found myself unable to complete a study of contemporary gay culture that I’d contracted to write. The book was meant to be a more or less straightforward examination of the way in which the books, movies, and art that gay people were producing, and the way they partied, shopped, traveled, and dined, reflected gay identity. But the deeper I got into the subject, the harder I found it to isolate just what “gay identity” might be, not least because I and most of the other gay men I knew seemed to be torn between the ostensibly straight identities and values we’d been brought up with (domesticity, stability, commitment, mortgages) and the “queer” habits and behaviors—in particular, the freewheeling, seemingly endless possibilities for unencumbered erotic encounters—made possible in enclaves that were exclusively gay. Because I didn’t want to suggest that I somehow stood outside those tensions and instabilities, I felt I had to write, in some part, about myself. This was the book that the reviewer introduced by alluding to “this confessional age.”
As for Freud’s charge that memoirs are flawed by mendacity, it may be that the culprit here is not really the memoir genre but simply memory itself. The most stimulating section of Yagoda’s book is one in which he considers, far too briefly and superficially, the vast scientific literature about memory and how it works. The gist is that a seemingly inborn desire on the part of Homo sapiens for coherent narratives, for meaning, often warps the way we remember things. The psychologist F.C. Bartlett, whom Yagoda quotes without discussing his work, once conducted an experiment in which people were told fables into which illogical or non sequitur elements had been introduced; when asked to repeat the tales, they omitted or smoothed over the anomalous bits. More recently, graduate students who were asked to recall what their anxiety level had been before an important examination consistently exaggerated that anxiety. As Yagoda puts it, “That little tale—‘I was really worried, but I passed’—would be memoir-worthy. The ‘truth�
�—‘I wasn’t that worried, and I passed’—would not.” In other words, we always manage to turn our memories into good stories—even if those stories aren’t quite true.
Anyone who writes a memoir doesn’t need psychology experiments to tell him that memories can be partial, or self-serving, or faulty. A few years ago, I was on a plane coming home from Australia, where I’d been interviewing Holocaust survivors for a book I was working on, a personal narrative rather different from my first book: an account of my search to find out exactly what happened to my mother’s uncle and his family, who were Polish Jews, during World War II. As I interviewed survivors from the same small town where my great-uncle had not survived, I asked not only about my relatives and what might have happened to them but about the tiniest details of life before, during, and after the war: what they ate for breakfast, who their middle school teachers were, how and where they spent their school holidays.
Both the mad ambition and the poignant inadequacy of those interviews—and perhaps of the whole project of reconstituting the past, anyone’s past, from memory—came home to me on the long flight home. I was sitting next to my brother Matt, a photographer, who was shooting portraits of the survivors we were interviewing, and about halfway through the flight some kids toward the back of the plane—a high school choir, I think it was—began singing a 1970s pop song in unison. Matt turned to me with an amused expression. “Remember we sang that in choir?” he asked.
I looked at him in astonishment. “Choir? You weren’t even in the choir,” I said to him. I’d been the president of the choir, and I knew what I was talking about.
Now it was his turn to be astonished. “Daniel,” he said. “I stood next to you on the risers during concerts!”
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