You almost beat me to my post Chauncy! Fiction, non-fiction, who gives a shit if it's readable?
I was on vacation this week, and this book,
Now there's a "scandal" because James Frey embelished a number of events. Here's the
I think this debate says a lot more about what people expect from labels like "fiction" and "non-fiction" than about Frey himself. It's a fluid line for most writers - and I doubt that this memoir was any more fictionalized than most others. One of my favorite books "Bastard Out of Carolina" was marketed as a novel, but it's mostly memoir. The publishers might have marketed it as a novel because they were trying to target a more "literary" audience. On the other hand, a recent memoir from Russia called "White on Black" has an entire chapter that's told from the points of view of a charater who's not the author. The book is being claimed as an "expose" of human rights abuses and nobody is claiming it's not strict non-fiction.
I think the label of "non-fiction" freed it from comparisons with more literary work, and people could read it as a really good, faced-paced story. It seems a little naive to expect strict reality from non-fiction. As far as I'm concerned, it's fiction the moment the words are on the page.
posted by SЯK @ Monday, January 09, 2006
4 Comments:
damn your swiftness, sana.
i agree about a work being fictional the moment it's on the page, but something about the pious and heavy-handed treatment of the whole chemical abuse story makes the prevarication here more egregious. the whole thing reeks of the partnership for a drug free america, or those irritating anti-smoking ads: crack is whack, guys. watch out.
besides, sandra bullock's "28 days" is all the rehab story i will ever need. where do you go after sandy tackles the hard topics, kids? maybe she'll do a movie about semantics and end this whole fiction/lying-to-sell-books dichotomy.
I think the most interesting part is today's (1-11) NYT, which basically has a story that quotes Frey's publisher as saying, "True? Not True? Who cares?"
Which means I need to revise my memoir.
Did you guys see that the publisher is now offering a refund? It'll be interesting to see how many of them get returned...
-Viz
Well, Oprah says it's "much ado about nothing." It looks to me a little more like the farce of sodom.
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