One year after the James Frey scandal became international news, the argument over standards for the memoir is as fierce and unsettled as ever.
The latest canon shot in this uncivil literary war comes out of Fourth Genre, a journal devoted to the memoir and a range of other concerns in creative nonfiction. (I’m one of 40 members of their editorial advisory board.) Here, from the most recent issue, is a short exchange in a long interview (full version available for $5 at the Fourth Genre) between author Stephanie S. Farber and influential memoirist Vivian Gornick:
GORNICK: The people at Goucher weren’t educated readers of memoir. They were literalists in a journalistic tradition, and confused newspaper reporting with memoir writing. They didn’t understand that memoir is composition, not reporting, not transcription. It is extremely silly to look upon the composition of scenes in a memoir as lies, or as something not the truth. The notion of literalism and factuality was a foolish yardstick for what is true or not in a memoir. The memoir is a genre that needs educated readers, not people who are reading for all the wrong things, in all the wrong ways.
Let’s deconstruct this exchange, beginning with the dramatized “gasp” in Farber’s question. That word is an embedded editorial, of course. The interviewer is a partisan. She believes, with Gornick, that an author can compose scenes and use composite elements and still purport to write nonfiction. She differentiates herself from those grunts at Goucher College who had the gall to question Gornick’s standards.
(Let me add that an introduction from Farber informs us that “the interview took place as we sat at Gornick’s kitchen table in Lower Manhattan.” It will be interesting to see what happens to this scene should it ever appear in a Farber memoir. Perhaps the author will seek some higher or deeper truth by placing it in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium or on the Staten Island Ferry.)
We need to pay close attention to the word “composing,” which in this case refers to the part of the writing process that requires “the aesthetic or artistic arrangement of pieces into a coherent whole.” That is a dictionary definition, but applies to Gornick’s argument that memoir should not be judged by the standards of journalistic factuality. Memoirs, you see, are not reported, they are composed — artistically.
But works of journalism are also “composed,” many in narrative form with scenes arrayed in a sequence. Thomas French, one of Gornick’s interrogators at Goucher, composed scenes for “Angels and Demons,” the series that won him a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Walt Harrington, who also took on Gornick at Goucher, has composed many scenes in his life as a journalist and author, including those in his recent memoir “Crossings: A White Man’s Journey into Black America.”
The issue is not whether scenes in memoir can be composed — of course they can — but whether in the process they veer, for whatever reason — from what the author knows happened in real life.
Because Gornick cannot win an epistemological argument over the nature of evidence and experience in memoir, she shifts her concerns to the competence of readers. In essence, she argues that the only worthy readers of memoir are those who accept her standards of truthfulness for nonfiction. Those are the “educated” readers who will understand and value her work, who have suspended not only their disbelief, but also their common sense belief that the words on the page mirror, in a practical way, the experience that has been described.
Gornick’s disdain for those who question her standards can no longer be contained. They are “silly,” “confused,” “foolish,” “uneducated.” They are not writers at all, but mere “transcribers.” I think it will take a long time to find another example of an author who blames criticism of her work and standards, so arrogantly, on the audience. Let them eat cake, Vivian. Le mémoire, c’est toi!
Shorn of its literary affectation, here is what I believe Gornick asserts as a standard: As a writer of memoir, I can make things up and still call it nonfiction. I can’t make up anything “whole cloth,” but I can turn a pub into a pizzeria, and I can take characteristics from three different people and call him Harry. I can use something that another person said and place it in the mouth of my mother, even if she objects. Furthermore, I don’t want to have to explain myself to my readers. The good ones remain willfully ignorant of my methods.
I have argued in USA Today that there are at least two sub-genres of memoir, and should be labeled as such. Walt Harrington, I would argue, has written a true “nonfiction memoir,” while Vivian Gornick writes something more accurately described as a “literary memoir.” In an ideal world, all authors would introduce memoirs with a note that makes the standards of composition transparent.
Farber’s interview with Gornick took place in February 2005, before the James Frey scandal became international news. In another venue, Gornick complained of the injustice of being tarred by an association with literary rogues, such as Frey. I don’t blame her.
But I’ve met James Frey and listened to his arguments in defense of distorting and exaggerating the details of his experience for literary effect. And I must say that Frey’s arguments are in tune with Gornick’s: that he was trying to get to the bottom of his experience, that his book was not a literal transcription of his life, but something deeper. In his mind, this justified the story that he wallowed in jail for three months, when it was only three hours; and that he suffered a root canal without painkillers, which seems increasingly doubtful; and that he had a close relationship with a girl who committed suicide, when he just knew of her. Are these “whole cloth” fabrications, or are they explorations within the bounds of Gornick’s shaky standards. Who knows?
I’m not sure if disagreements over the standards for memoir constitute sectarian violence or something greater, an uncivil war. Gornick may be tired of answering these questions, but they will not go away. A story in the upcoming Vanity Fair describes how the family of memoirist Augusten Burroughs, author of “Running with Scissors,” is suing him for distorting their story and hanging them out to dry. The suit argues that the author, with complicity of the publisher, “literally has fabricated events that never happened and manufactured controversy that never occurred.” Such legal action will lead, I predict, to even more disguising of characters and distorting of scenes by authors trying to cover their tracks from would-be litigants. Maybe the safest and most honest strategy for such authors is to call the written creature by its true name: fiction.