How to Sound Smart This Week: Fake Memoir Edition |
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| Talking points for the Margaret Jones and Misha Defonseca scandals | |
 by Izzy Grinspan, March 4, 2008 |
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Stuff white people like: SeltzerRemember the early days of 2006, when first J.T. Leroy and then James Frey turned out to be fabulists? False memoirists always seem to get exposed in pairs, and this week is no exception.
First, Misha Defonseca, author of Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, admitted that she'd invented her entire story – which, given that it involved one scene where a pre-teen Misha killed a Nazi and two others in which she had mystical encounters with wolves, wasn’t a huge surprise to the 5000 or so people who bought the book. Then it came out that the critically-beloved Love and Consequences wasn't a memoir by a woman named Margaret B. Jones who grew up on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles, but actually a work of fiction by a writer named Margaret Seltzer who grew up on the very nice and highly accommodating streets of Sherman Oaks in the Valley.
Everyone’s going to be talking about this all week, so we’re here to provide you with a couple angles:
- What is “truth,” anyway? This seems to be the approach taken by Defonseca, who has said "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.” Which is, of course, egregious bullshit, but so is The Hills. So were the WMDS, for the matter. At this point in the history of American pop culture, we’re all pretty used to being told things are reality when they’re just objectively not. If the false reality is entertaining or sustaining enough, we tend to accept it, at least in the realms of television and politics, so how is literature any different? Do we just hold it to a different standard because it’s…high-brow? Or old-fashioned? A relic from the days when “reality” actually meant something?
- Would Love and Consequences have gotten so much attention—or gotten a book deal at all—if the author wasn't a white girl? Are white people only capable of hearing about the black experience if it's coming from another white person? Margaret Seltzer told The New York Times that she was only trying to speak for the people she met as an anti-gang campaigner: “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk."
- Maybe the real problem here, as many people suggested during Frey-gate, is that we’re asking too much of the memoir genre. Maybe we ought to come up with a gray area for true-enough books – literature that’s close enough to reality to stimulate our collective national voyeurism problem, but doesn’t bear the burden of actually being true. Critics have hailed Seltzer’s book, unlike, say, A Million Little Pieces, as actually really good. Personally, I still want to read it, true or not. Can’t we just shelve it in the “probably bullshit” genre and leave it at that?
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Monica Osborne
Given the fact that this
Given the fact that this kind of literary "deception" has begun to be a rapidly recurring phenomenon, I wonder if the better question (as opposed to "is it okay to fake a memoir?") is: Why is it happening, and what is our society's/culture's role in this new epidemic of sorts?" When you (Izzy) write "At this point in the history of American pop culture, we’re all pretty used to being told things are reality when they’re just objectively not," I think you're on to something, in part.
By this point we should all know that the lines between fact and fiction or memoir and fantasy are often pretty blurry, hence the newer genre distinction of "Creative Non-Fiction." But I think part of the reason people are driven to market their fantasies as reality has to do with the way we idolize "reality" tv shows and talk shows that, at the end of the day, are nearly as scripted as a sitcom. We seem, as a culture, to be most drawn to anything that has the "real" or "reality" stamp on it, even we know it's fake, so how you can we blame people for picking up on this fact and applying it to literary endeavors as well, especially when it may mean the difference between being a nobody author who is never read, and being someone who people are talking about.
I don't agree with the deception of it all, but I guess my point is, doesn't our culture, in every other venue, applaud this kind of "deception"?
JewcyCraig
New?
Maybe it's just that this shit has been going on forever and it just so happens that luxury has finally crept up on us so much that it finally qualifies as big news. Or big news enough that we'll talk about it.
It's basically the same thing as "Go Ask Alice" turning out to be not a real diary at all, but a preachy thesis on drug usage by its editor?
Ismail
"We seem, as a culture, to
"We seem, as a culture, to be most drawn to anything that has the "real" or "reality" stamp on it, even we know it's fake, so how you can we blame people for picking up on this fact and applying it to literary endeavors as well, especially when it may mean the difference between being a nobody author who is never read, and being someone who people are talking about."
How can I blame anyone for putting their own interest in fame above being truthful, especially when the culture gives its imprimatur to doing so? Are you serious? Shall we have the same reaction to a deceitful and manufactured biography as we do to professional wrestling?
May I denounce a bad act only when popular culture does not contain some justification for it? You speak as though the plagiarists and liars in question are just somehow swept up in the zeitgeist, blown along by the cultural winds. In fact, they sit down and take months or years to construct elaborate fictions, they tell their editors that what they've submitted is accurate, they construct more lies when confronted with improbabilities, and only when the evidence becomes overwhelming do they whine about their Dickensian childhoods and the consequent imperative to be deceitful.
This whole operation can be perfectly described, leaving no salient element out, using such simple and sturdy notions as "fraud", "deceit", "disregard for others", etc. No appeals to the cultural field are necessary or useful.
Do you blame Larry Craig for fulminating against gay people while sucking dicks in bathrooms? Of course he had reasons to act out his deceits (which, if one edits out the sociological folderol, is all you were saying in your original post)-there are always reasons to lie. Most of see the utility, though, in preserving the idea of "blame" to apply to those folks who willfully deceive others for their own benefit.
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