does the truth matter?
Best selling author James Frey has gotten busted for wildly exaggerating portions of his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."
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At the same time, it was discovered that JT Leroy, who wrote a memoir about being a teenage male hooker, is actually a middle aged woman with middle class roots.
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Does the truth matter when it comes to memoirs? Knowing that "A Million Little Pieces" is not all true, is it still a strong piece of work? What about JT Leroy's "memoir?" Can it still hold it's own as a fictional work?
Also, how accountable should authors be in writing their memoirs? They aren't journalists. But should they be accountable?
-Jean Chen
posted by flika @ 10:05 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
A memoir is not bound by the same rules as journalism. Most of the people that upset about the book are just mindless followers and it is a shame that people can even take responsibilty for the things they read. If this book wasn't mentioned on Oprah, nobody would've cared if it was real or fake.
I think "Leroy's" books don't really fit in the same category as Frey's. For one, they never claimed to be factual in any but the most superficial way. A novel is not a memoir regardless of how autobiographical it may be.
While it was a betrayal of fans and defenders, her unmasking doesn't really change the quality of the books themselves, and actually I think it's rather sad that the felt they needed to resort to these shock tactics to get published.
As for Frey...he's a pathetic rehab-failure who's not even an especially good writer. As far as the books themselves go, there is no comparison.
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