Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

discuss.

in case you dont know what this is all about, i present you with a linkdump via gawker:

http://www.gawker.com/news/james-frey/e ... 148029.php

this is RIPE for REAL conversation, this is a big deal, or a small deal, but nevertheless something real. there is lots to side with here, lots to discuss, debate, decragulate, dismiss, devour, ho HO! (allusion there if you get it) let's get off topic and really get into this one.

and u ppl call yrselves writers. wha-

Re: 'A Million Little Pieces'

A memoir should be as close to the actual truth as can be remembered, or else it breaks down quickly. Which things are true and which are made up? The narrator becomes a fictional, or semi-fictional character...... which is fine, if the work is published as a novel, I suppose. But a memoir? I don't think so. I think Frey went too far with this one.

Whaddya think?

personally i think that it was presented wrong. he can say now that it wasnt presented as a memoir of actual events, but he's lying. i think the form in and of itself is fine and i'd rather read a fictionalized gonzo report of a person's life as literature. i think that memoirs should be written as fiction anyway. fiction presented as memoir form, as long as no outside pretenses are made that the memoir is really memoir (public appearances to that effect, press documents, etc), is more fun, tho, and i think what will develop from this is that more fiction is written in memoir form.

i think he'll sell more books now.

The thing that bugs me most about James Frey (and JT Leroy, for that matter) is that they only got published because the stuff was supposedly true. In Frey case, he claimed it was a memoir, in Leroy's case, it was 'autobiographical' fiction. In the Smoking Gun report on Frey, it was even claimed that the publisher wouldn't publish the book as fiction (Frey's original intention) so he came back with it as a memoir, and voila, publishing success. In the case of Leroy, now that s/he's been exposed as a fake, the duped are saying that 'well, it's a shame and all but the writing is still great and we'd have published anyways.' Bull-shit. If someone sent you a bunch of ficitonal stories about a 12 year old boy who was forced in to truck stop prostitution by his whore mom and ended up with AIDS, you'd take a pass. Unless you could market it as autobiographical. Cause then you've got a marketing angle. Plus you can get slumming starfucking celebrities to promote it for you.

Why is that though? Why do we need to believe writers lived there stories? I mean, for all the Bukowski fans, would they still be fans if he had been a comfortable rich guy writing about being poor? Are you reading for the writing, the story, or the vicarious thrill of slumming without the reality of being poor and alchoholic? Would On the Road be so popular if Kerouac had never left his mother's attic yet imagined that whole brilliant thing?

Frank Sinatra didn't write his own songs but nobodies claiming he's any less of an artist, yet today people who are strictly 'performers' are considered manufactured pop confections with minimal talent.

I don't know, the whole thing just rubs me the wrong way for a number of reasons.

shamatha, i agree with you on the jt leroy fiasco. that whole thing is complete bullshit.

publishers should either make an effort to find out if the nonfiction/memoir stuff they receive is legit, or put some kind of note in the book and say "the author is making these claims and we have not verified if these claims are true or accurate."

but, yeah. i'm calling bullshit on jt leroy.

Wait a second - what did JT Leroy try to pass off as memoir? All the copies of "Sarah" I've ever seen indicate explicitly that it's a novel, and it's about 12 year old boy who becomes a cross-dressing truck stop prostitute due to his whoring mother. He doesn't get AIDS though

All that being said, "Sarah" is the only work by Leroy I've read or ever seen for that matter

it makes me very happy that oprah got bamboozled on the whole thing. at least we have that.

if you'll notice, ayalet waldemen (sp?) got into the mix, sort of trying to defend the authors. she's married to michael chabon, who got into a bruhaha last year for pretending he knew a holocaust survivor and then inventing a short story for readings about it. when it was "discovered" he was lying, he pretended that his pretense should have been understood.

i think that famous writers are passing this stuff off and then later claiming literary freedoms, whereas those literary freedoms would not be accepted before the fact, only after the fact. i'd rather that these writers flaunt literary freedoms as such before the fact. but it speaks to the lack of literary freedoms in popular literature that this is way that things happen.

i wrote a new word meaning yesterday during a walk. it should all be called "faction" and lets move on.

(patent pending)

ok, see, now this is getting out of hand.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... ey25m.html

readers are SUING him for "lost time" based on his misrepresentation.

does this mean that the estate of george eliot can be sued for misrepresenting the works of a female writer pretending to be a male writer?

oh dear.

can we file a class action suit against stupid people?

can we file a class action suit against stupid people?

If only.....

Yeah, fraud is fraud.... But a lawsuit? Jeez....

Frey will make some good money on this book, but he might have a hard time selling any of his future writing.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articl ... 29,00.html

Author admits tall tales and writes apology

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles, Thursday February 2, 2006,
The Guardian

James Frey, the discredited author of the best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, has admitted making things up and exaggerating his role in events to further the book's "greater purpose". In an author's note to be included in future editions, he writes: "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."

Reality, he says, did not serve his literary purpose. "I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require. I altered events and details all the way through the book."

He has said that he read War and Peace during a three-month jail term which forms one of the most telling passages. In fact he served a few hours. Of a train crash which killed a girl from his school, he writes: "While I was not, in real life, directly involved in the accident, I was profoundly affected by it."

The book purports to tell the story of his fight against addiction. It rose to the top of the bestseller lists in the US at the end of last year after it was endorsed by the television personality Oprah Winfrey. But doubts emerged at the beginning of this year when a website questioned the validity of many of his claims.

Calling his book a "subjective truth", Frey argues: "Memoir allows the writer to work from memory instead of from a strict journalistic or historical standard. It is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection. This memoir is a combination of facts about my life and certain embellishments."

He ends his note: "I am deeply sorry to any readers who I have disappointed and I hope these revelations will not alter their faith in the book's central message." The release of the note on his publisher's website, randomhouse.com comes the day after Frey's agent dropped him.

readers are SUING him for "lost time" based on his misrepresentation

To paraphrase John Stewart:

That's what you get when you make the American people read when they could have been watching tv...or something...