By "Content-Rich" We Mean "Total Failure"; or, the issue of Truth in Biography

Saturday morning early, and a cup of coffee in my hand. Last night was the press and heat and crush of two good friends' rehearsal dinner, and today is the calm in the center of the storm before tomorrow's full-fledged ritual experience. And also, I have a post for you.

Like many people who fight for the title of "author", I subscribe to Publisher's Lunch. Some mornings it's just another piece of mail in my inbox, sad to say, and sometimes I just browse for a couple seconds to see if they've added California to their health care plan; but a few mornings ago, I received this, and immediately wished I had said it--if perhaps with a bit more flair.

Journalist Malcolm Knox--who uncovered the lies in Norma Khouri's book--worked with Sudanese refugee and one-time boy soldier Cola Bilkuei on his book COLA'S JOURNEY and was asked to verify the book's accuracy. (Just published in Australia, it is not available elsewhere for now.)

"So what are we left with? Aside from boy soldiers, a priest and a lawyer who knew Cola in Africa, we have the assurances of the Australian government, which gave Cola his first passport and checked on him through cousins who already lived here....

"Ultimately, though, between what could be verified and what lies on the pages of Cola's book, there will always remain a margin where we must simply take his word. Some will ask why any author's word should be trusted. My answer is that if we take such a hard line, we will deprive ourselves of all oral history, of every story that is one person's recollection.

"If we did that, winnowing history to what is documented on official records, swathes of human experience would be lost. What we must do is check what can be checked, then extrapolate from it."

So, I worked in a bookstore during the Oprah-fueled popularity of A Million Little Pieces. For those of you who weren't following, it was lauded as an amazing and disturbing little book, dealing with a man's recovery from multiple addictions. I have not read it, I cannot say anything else authoritatively. Oprah loved the book, and had James Frey on her show to promote it--when it was added to her Book Club it received the expected upsurge of rabid purchasing fever.

Then it came out that James Frey had made some bits of it up.

At this point it devolves into rumors and sound bites--I can't know for certain what is true, and my time in college keeps me from really wanting to stick my neck out on a spurious source. All I know is that the outrage became ridiculous--I remember being nearly slapped in the face with a copy of A Million Little Pieces by a woman shrieking at me, insulting my intellect and chanting "This is not a memoir!" with a variety of different enunciations.

And again, I leap to the defense of a book I haven't read and don't really plan on reading when I say: Please.

It seems certain at this late stage that James Frey embellished. But before we knew that everyone was talking about how vivid and brutal his prose was. And now, it turns out, some of it was fictional. So what?

He was an inspiration to addicts to get off drugs. That's truly wonderful. But I know people who have drawn inspiration from, among other things--Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which I pray was fictional in places); the poetry of Emily Dickinson (hypnogogic even when you understand it); Tim Powers' Last Call (urban fantasy); and any one of a dozen classic and canonical texts. If someone falls back into their old ways because an author made part of their book up, how fragile was their inspiration in the first place?

I am primarily a reader of fiction--I break into little internal wars whenever I try to read nonfiction--so perhaps that is why I am having trouble understanding. But what does the grounding in total fact have to do with anything? Why is this applied to books but not to biographical films, which certainly dramatize aspects of the story (see: the presentation of John Nash's condition in A Beautiful Mind; the final scene of Man On The Moon)? Is this an outgrowth of the constant geek tap-dance of reality and physics equations that marks our tearing down of whichever Star Trek iteration we hated? Are we just a culture so divorced from the written word that we have to fact-check everything?

I for one go with what Mr. Knox had the courage to say there, but I take it one step further. Our oldest and most primal stories do not speak to a truth that can be checked; there aren't any footnotes for cosmogony. In an autobiography, you should be concerned about speaking truthfully--but you should be just as concerned about speaking deeply. Frey's story, from my encounters with it, touches the deeper truths of addiction and recovery--and gives us some ghastly little scares to boot; similarly, the story of a boy soldier has a right to focus a little more on the tragedy than on the minutiae. Journalism is, of course, a different animal--but that, like so many things, is for another post.