The Truth is Out There
Readers want authenticity, they want insight – they want truth. Helen Lewis asks: how far are authors prepared to go to give them what they want?
It takes a lot to make Oprah Winfrey, queen of touchy-feely sofa chats, absolutely furious. But James Frey managed it. Last year Winfrey selected Frey’s harrowing memoir of his recovery from drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces, for her influential book club and it went on to sell more than three and a half million copies worldwide. Originally published in 2003, the book chronicles Frey’s descent into alcoholism, drug addiction and criminality, his time in prison, and the tragic death of several of his school classmates. Clearly, Oprah was moved. She told her viewers that the book had kept her awake
and made several of her staff cry. It was, she said, a ‘gut-wrenching memoir that is raw and it’s so real...’. She invited Frey on her show for an interview in which he told her, ‘I think I wrote about the events in the book truly and honestly and accurately’.
Then in January this year the investigative website The Smoking Gun published ‘A Million Little Lies’, a savage demolition of many incidents Frey had reported as fact. Contradicting his claim to have spent three ‘boring’ months in prison, TSG asserted: ‘The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post a $733 cash bond.’ Since then Frey’s fortunes have fallen somewhat. He has been forced to include an author’s note in future editions: ‘I embellished many details about my past experiences, and altered others in order to serve what I felt was the greater purpose of the book.’ His agent said that after four years, she could no longer represent him.
After initially denying that A Million Little Pieces was anything other than God’s honest truth, Frey changed his story. He told Larry King: ‘I think of the book as working in sort of a tradition of what American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac ... at the time of their books being published, the genre of memoir didn’t exist ... Some people think it’s creative non-fiction. It’s generally recognised that the writer of a memoir is retelling a subjective story.’ His publisher Nan Talese, claiming that the book had struck her as so ‘authentic’ that no effort was made to fact-check it, added: ‘A memoir is different from an autobiography. A memoir is an author’s remembrance of a certain period in his life.’
But there’s one part of the story that’s often forgotten, something that suggests that Frey’s publishers should have been less trusting. As far back as 2003, the Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan noted: ‘Interestingly, Frey originally touted the book to prospective publishers as a work of fiction, and how much he has exaggerated or embroidered in the telling is anyone’s guess, though he insists it all happened as it is written.’ It was only when it was summarily rejected by more than a dozen firms that A Million Little Pieces was reborn as a ‘memoir’.
Some might say that readers have no right to expect total honesty from anything they read; indeed, if they are particularly pedantic, that the whole idea of ‘truth’ is nonsense. Whether or not the critics were naïve to embrace Frey’s ‘confession’ is debatable. But after he was unmasked, it was generally agreed that the book was devalued. Niki Shisler, writing in The Guardian, summed the feeling up nicely: ‘The book only works because we believe he really lived it. As fiction, it simply wasn’t good enough.’ And imagine how this Amazon reviewer must have felt on finding out the book was largely fictional: ‘James Frey is extremely honest about his experiences and this makes for a gripping read, I couldn’t put the book down. As someone who has no experience of the life that James Frey has been part of, I feel that I now have at least some insight into the controlling world of addiction and hopefully a bit more understanding towards those who become embroiled in it.’
Exploiting our obsession
Literary hoaxes are nothing new: think of Thomas Chatterton in the eighteenth century – overflowing with talent but unable to get published, he passed his work off as that of a medieval priest. When the truth was revealed, he killed himself – thus ensuring literary fame, of a sort. What is new, however, is the conspiracy, whether witting or unwitting, between publishers and the media to present the author as just as important as their work.
Around the same time as the James Frey affair the bona fides of another American confessional author were also under scrutiny. JT LeRoy first popped up in 1997, with a short story published under the name of ‘Terminator’ (which is apparently what the ‘T’ of JT stands for; the ‘J’ is for Jeremy). His first novel Sarah, the tale of a 12-year-old ‘lot lizard’, or truck-stop prostitute, called Cherry Vanilla was published in 2001 to gushing praise from the literary establishment. They were particularly impressed with the author’s personal insight into the world he described: for JT had himself been a ‘lizard’ before contracting HIV, weaning himself off heroin and discovering literature. His subsequent trajectory was almost embarrassingly meteoric. The books that followed, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Harold’s End dealt with broadly the same subjects as his first: child prostitution, transsexualism and drug abuse and were similarly critically acclaimed. He is credited as associate producer on Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant and has written in just about every fashionable magazine worth its salt. A Guardian journalist sent to interview the reclusive megastar summed up the glow surrounding him by saying LeRoy had more celebrity followers than Scientology.
There was only one problem with this nascent cult: no one knew anything about him. The biography included in his books simply read, ‘JT LeRoy lives in California and enjoys playing whiffleball’, and he insisted on attending almost all public events and readings in a wig, shades and trilby. So rumours started to swirl that LeRoy was a pseudonym for another author; that his work was in fact written by a collective; that his existence was the greatest literary hoax since Chatterton. The speculation came to head in October 2005 when New York Magazine published a piece by journalist Stephen Beachy entitled ‘Who is the real JT LeRoy?’ Beachy had followed LeRoy since his first readings in 2000, and yet could not find any evidence for his existence. LeRoy was, he concluded, a hoax – the creation of a 39-year-old singer called Laura Albert, who accompanied the person playing ‘LeRoy’ under various aliases such as ‘Emily Frasier’ and ‘Speedie’.
Of course, if this solved one problem, it created another. If Albert is LeRoy the author, who is the mannish figure of ‘LeRoy’ the person? Laura Barton of The Guardian, who interviewed both LeRoy and ‘Emily Frasier’ in January of this year, got no further than this: ‘LeRoy is 5ft 5in and vaguely stocky; barefoot in baggy shorts with orange leggings beneath, and a tattered, shapeless top … Today he is make-up-less, and a faint down lies on his top lip. Nevertheless, the first impression is one of femininity.’ Phil Oltermann of Zembla magazine, who met LeRoy and Speedie at a photoshoot, disagrees: ‘“JT” had a very high voice and no facial hair, but also no breasts and a body posture that looked masculine to me.’ But he added: ‘If it’s all a hoax, a performance – and I am sure some of it is – then the people behind it identify so totally with their assumed personas that they don’t really think they are “deceiving” people. They are completely locked into their spiel – when I heard about the New York Magazine story I didn’t feel outraged, I thought it was actually quite tragic. In a way I found “JT” much more of a repulsive figure beforehand, when he was still collecting celebrities and endorsing brands – now at least it felt like the joke was on the celebs.’
Who is playing the public role of JT is relatively unimportant, of course, compared with who writes the books he is credited with. Most commentators agree this is Laura Albert, who shrugged off the fact she is neither transsexual nor HIV positive nor in fact a former child prostitute by telling Barton: ‘People didn’t freak out cos Mark Twain’s real name wasn’t Mark Twain! Celebrity magazines didn’t want to know about Charles Dickens!’
Rumours of the author’s demise have been greatly exaggerated
Perhaps Albert is right, and it shouldn’t matter who wrote something, or whether it really happened – after all, knowledge of an author’s life is certainly not a prerequisite for a good interpretation of their work, something which ought to be some hoary old critical saw that’s so obvious as not be worth stating, and yet … it’s not. It’s not at all. Michel Foucault, writing in 1969, was confident that the modern author had disappeared into ‘transcendental anonymity’. Nevertheless, he acknowledged the importance of an author’s name to the reader: ‘Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts.’ The author’s name, therefore, has a ‘classificatory function’: in modern marketing terms, it is a brand, and, despite all this critical huffing and puffing about readers’ obsession with the author, it’s one that has become more powerful and insistent than ever. It’s as though a generation of readers had all poured over Said’s Orientalism, nodded sagely, and then gone away and lionised Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The publishing industry is partly to blame for this. Books are increasingly marketed as packages rather than texts and, as with so many other products, the brand (or author) is seen as more important than the item (or content). Hence the rise of the celebrity author, whose existence is in itself deemed interesting enough to warrant recording, even if – apart from being famous – the subject’s life has been relatively mundane. And because of our obsession with authorship and self-revelation, we don’t want authorised biographies – we want to hear the story in his or her ‘own words’ (even if it subsequently becomes apparent that the celebrity in question has not even read her own autobiography, much less written it). Memoir peddlers are getting younger and younger: Billie Piper (age: 23) recently signed up to do her autobiography, and Jordan (age: 28) has already done two. You have to wonder, how much can people in their twenties really have to say about themselves? The lack of content for 20-year-old Wayne Rooney’s autobiography was skewered by celebrity gossip site Holy Moly, which offered this extract:
Today I played football with my friends I wore a red shirt then I visited a lady who looked like my mum and played with my winkey when I got home Coleen was cross and threw my fishfingers in the bin so I bought her some shoes made of gold and then I went to bed.
So does all this silliness herald the demise of literature as we know it? The Observer’s literary editor, Robert McCrum, certainly thinks so. In a blistering attack on publishers’ and readers’ obsessions this spring he wrote: ‘This is Lit Lite, offering a short route to a quick buck, a blast of instant celebrity, and a text devoid of consequence and meaning.’
The death of the novel has been confidently predicted before, but could the doom-mongers be right this time? Writing this has made me feel thoroughly depressed, and not just as a consequence of becoming a world expert on footballers’ penis sizes through my brief, and entirely research-related, perusal of Being Jordan. This feeling persisted until I happened to stumble on a book called Erasure by an American author rejoicing in the name of Percival Everett, which I bought on the strength of the blurb on the back: ‘With sales at an all time low, your family falling apart, and your agent telling you you’re not black enough, what’s an author to do but write a ghetto novel and call it "Fuck"?’ The book is brilliant: combatively intelligent, allusive without being stodgy, and magnificently funny at the expense of a literary establishment who can write, ‘The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience,’ and then shower praise on the ‘real-ness’ of a novel called Fuck, written as a deliberate parody. It is also, hearteningly, papery proof that our current obsession with the author, and demand for authenticity is just another literary fashion, and one already ripe for subversion. If it has produced just one book worth reading, that’s enough. The novel is dead …
Long live the novel!
