Truth vs Fiction

My sister tells me that when I report things she’s said or done, I only get it 75% right. My husband has protested a few of my entries: “Did you have to say I haven’t bought you jewelry in 8 years? You neglected to mention that it took that long to figure out your taste.” (Hon, the main point was that when you did make the big second step, you did a GREAT job.)

In the midst of those comments the James Frey fiasco erupted. His memoir on his recovery from drug addiction apparently contains fabrications. The story broke when The Smoking Gun tried to get Frey’s mugshot from a supposed 3-month jail stint and discovered he’d been in custody for a few hours after driving drunk. This led them on a massive fact check. During a Larry King interview where Frey defended himself, Oprah called in to lend her support “I rely on the publishers to define the category [fiction vs. non]… But the underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me, and I know it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book.” The publisher is taking the same line. It’s back to good old Machiavelli and the ends vs. the means.

I’m really disturbed by the outright lies. I guess right up until publication they weren’t sure if they were going to publish as novel or memoir, so maybe that gives the guy some wiggle room? On the other hand, once they decided memoir, maybe he should have gone back through to rewrite the parts he fabricated. I mean, you don’t confuse a few hours in lock-up with 3 months in jail no matter how many drugs you’ve ingested.

Back to my little twitches to make entries more dramatic or succinct. One example: when I flew to Seattle, my niece wasn’t 8 months old. Sure when you count from May to January (and aren’t very good at mom math) it’s 8 months; but the truth is she was only 7 months and 10 days when I arrived.

Jrex and I went out to dinner and mused about this whole idea (guess who made which points):

  "It’s a memoir. It’s filtered through one person’s perspective. Isn’t it a given that events will be recorded in ways that ultimately puts the author in a better light? That’s not the intention, but it’s a rare person who, in the end, isn’t willing to defend his or her own point of view against someone else’s."
  "But then you’re choosing to hold the story as more sacred than the person."
  "So would you say that tweaking a blog entry is wrong?"
  "Yes."
  "I would imagine most people written about in someone’s memoir feel the story was slanted and they weren’t portrayed as they would have portrayed themselves. But isn't it the right of the writer to tell the story from their perspective? When does the artwork (and a blog is NOT artwork), but it’s a tangential thought, gain a life of it’s own? Sometimes if you choose the person over the art, you violate the piece and violate your soul as the artist.
  "It’s never acceptable to value something more than another person? Why do you have to make it? Or, even if you have to make it, why does it have to be on public display?"
  "Yet some part of being an artist is a drive to share that thought/emotion/object with the world. There’s a desire to connect. To make others not feel alone, to not feel alone yourself [In the interests of honesty, that thought occurred to me as I wrote the entry and was not put forth in discussion…]"
  "Why? Why does it have to be public? What is the gain?"
  "But there's a difference between catharsis and craftsmanship. A private journal vs. a public blog. I would never have written about Amherst/Seattle/Baltimore in my journal. My journals are to be burned on my deathbed since they contain emotional vomit. They would only be valuable to the world if I was famous and someone wanted to know who or what pissed me off or made me sad."

We didn’t come to any specific conclusions except that I will try to be more exact when I feature others on the blog.

I suspect that our discussion comes back to issues of privacy vs. publicity. I’m not sure why I’m wired to want to allow my life to be on the public stage. I know part of it comes from my Mom. She made choices to be vulnerable about her pain and in doing so made it ok for others to be vulnerable in return. As a result she helped heal many people. She made it ok for me to be angry, ok to be sad, ok to be playful, ok to be intense, ok to be myself and be happy about it. One of her core values was to not have secrets. She’d had an abusive father and she refused to participate in his wrongdoing by allowing it to be a hidden thing of shame in her life. There is freedom in verbalizing embarrassments. Things of darkness brought to the light lose their power. She didn’t seem to hide much about her marriage either, and I never heard my father complain or try to get her to stop. But I married a private man; my mother married an oblivious one.

I know all that is a separate issue from saying my niece is 7 months and 10 days vs. 8 months old. But in the midst of our discussion, our differing core values around publicity and privacy were yet again at odds. I don’t want to give up freedom and he thinks that my definition of freedom is often self-centered. (Which is probably true.) But letting a censor into my self-expression? It’s my blog and I get to tell what I want to! Yet in the back of my mind James Frey stands like a condemning shadow. When does freedom of expression become an unacceptable lie?