December 10, 2018 Issue

Louis Menand, in his “Faking It,” in this week’s issue, says,

There have always been writers who cheated on the pact. A case most people know is that of James Frey’s 2003 memoir of recovery from addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine, “A Million Little Pieces.” The book was hugely popular, but it turned out to be partly fabricated, something Frey was forced to admit on television under the interrogation of Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen “A Million Little Pieces” for her book club and thereby made it a best-seller.

The “pact” that Menand refers to is the “autobiographical pact,” which he defines as “the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the ‘I,’ of the text.” But in the case of A Million Little Pieces, it wasn’t Frey’s identity that was in issue; it was his fabrication of its contents. Frey represented fiction as fact. This isn’t a breach of the autobiographical pact; it’s much more serious than that. It’s a violation of the ironclad injunction governing all nonfiction: Don’t mess with the facts. John McPhee, in his Draft No. 4, puts it this way: 

It is sometimes said that the line between fiction and nonfiction has become blurred. Not in this eye, among beholders. The difference between the two is distinct.

Interestingly, Menand, in his piece, identifies “three traditional lines of defense” for books like A Million Little Pieces:

1. The surrogacy defense – “This is the theory that, although a particular event recounted in the book may not have happened to the author, it happened to someone. Such a book, then, is really the life story of a group. The memoirist should be understood as representing all African-American men in the era of Jim Crow, or all indigenous people in Guatemala. Experiences common to the group are therefore legitimately represented as happening to a single, quasi-allegorical figure.”

2. The higher-truth defense – “This is the argument that fabrications and exaggerations in books like these are in the service of more fully conveying ‘what it is really like’ to be Guatemalan or in recovery or whatever the theme of the life story happens to be. 'A Million Little Pieces' tries to capture the experience of recovering from addiction. Readers don’t care whether these things literally happened to James Frey, because they didn’t buy the book to find out about James Frey. They bought it to learn about addiction and recovery. James Frey’s job as a writer is only to convey that experience.”

3. The literature professor’s defense – “Forget about whether the story ‘truly’ happened to some ‘real’ person—a philosophical rabbit hole. We are judging words on a page. Either they work for us or they don’t.”

I find these arguments unconvincing. McPhee speaks for me. So does Janet Malcolm. In the Afterword of her great The Journalist and the Murderer, she says,

The writer of nonfiction is under contract to the reader to limit himself to events that actually occurred and to characters who have counterparts in real life, and he may not embellish the truth about these events or these characters.

No philosophical rabbit hole there.