Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Million little topics of discussion
I know this is an old story, but if you haven't read about the controversy surrounding James Frey's Million Little Pieces, read The Smoking Gun article here. It raises many questions about authorial intention blah blah blah, but if you like to see what gets Oprah squiriming, read all about it. Slate's take can be found here, or read about the book's "emotional truth" here. I really have no opinion, except that a good read is a good read, even if the author seems to misrepresent him-/herself. Would you enjoy a book any less if you knew more about the life of the author? Should you?
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3 comments:
A good read is a good read, but when sold as a memoir, there might be some responsibility on the author to reveal whether the events in the work actually happened or if they were fabrications. What's interesting to me in all this is that I think he's being defended (it seems) on the basis that it's ok because he was revealing a "deeper, essential truth" (i.e. durgs are bad). Many people (i.e. Oprah) are defending Frey because they are boradly supportive of this position, and would NOT be defending Frey if the "deeper truth" he was exposing didn't confirm their ingrained anti-drug paranoia. They likely wouldn't be quite so supportive of "lies as truth" if the story wasn't rehashing the tired old story about drugs ruining lives. In sum: it's interesting that lying to make a point is OK by most people as long as the point being made agrees with their preconcieved notions of truth.
Firstly, I agree that marketing something as a memoir when it is really fiction does entail responsibility on the part of the author, or at least on the part of the publisher. When an author presumes to tell others how to live their lives, or at least how not to live their lives, he better have some moral authority to back it up.
Secondly, regarding the "deep, essential truth," sometimes, you must admit, drugs do ruin lives. It can't all be "ingrained anti-drug paranoia;" there are actual facts proving that, in most cases, "drugs are bad."
I would disagree. I will admit that drugs CAN ruin lives (or at least help people ruin them), but this is far from "most" cases. There are thousands upon thousands of people who have used various drugs at various points of their lives without "ruining their lives". Some form of mind-alteration using drugs is a pretty universal characteristic of human soceity. The people who use drugs casually (or at least semi-responsibly) FAR outnumber those who use them to ruin their lives. Incidentally, the point of my post was not to necessarily to defend drug use (although of course it does that, too), but to point out that we tend to ignore stretching of the truth when it's done to support a position we hold dear, while we will be very critical when someone lies to perpetuate something we disagree with (my comments being a perfect example).
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