Manufactured Truth, Manufactured Scandal
By Ivy Pruss
Published on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
To the Editor:
Since Oprah's tearful meltdown, it has become trendy to hate (and sue) James Frey, author of the bestselling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." Let me propose a very unpopular opinion: he is not, as most would like to peg him, a liar. Instead, he has become the scapegoat for the corporate hobgoblin publishing houses that routinely employ similar strategies for manufacturing bestsellers.
Consider another recent bestseller, "Prep," by Curtis Sittenfeld. Although officially called fiction, this book became wildly successful because the marketers at Random House decided it would be. A book that builds on a prep-school romance, marketing strategies for "Prep" included sending yearbook photos of the author's high school crush to influential reviewers to make readers think Sittenfeld's story was based on events from her life.
Random House, which also published "A Million Little Pieces," knows that memoirs make easy bestsellers. So consider that James Frey originally marketed his work as fiction, to the end that a total of 17 publishing houses turned it down.
James Frey's work expresses emotional truths. Any author who buys into the distinction between memoir and fiction does so only to get his or her book in print. Fiction and memoir alike cannot come from anything other than the creative reproduction of an internalized experience.
Instead of berating Frey, the scandal-greedy public needs to accept responsibility for creating the marketing culture that puts a premium on writing "the truth" -- a value in literature that is as fabricated as the fiction Frey has been accused of writing.