What does James Frey tell us about writing today?
By Courtney Palmbush '00
Illustration by Martin Jarrie
"At best," reflects Annie Dillard in her book The Writing Life, "the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace." Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a literary amalgam of memoir and metaphor about which Eudora Welty said, "The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about her book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel."
The current literary vogue is the memoir, a classification that implies that what is being presented is truth, perhaps the literary equivalent of the photograph. And although we may know that photographs can lie, it's human nature to believe what we see. To understand that even nonfiction is fictional in its own way can be a tricky business, and it may be asking more of the reader than the reader can give.
There is one question concerning the place of truth in writing that seems to have been overlooked in the James Frey ordeal; in fact, it concerns many bestsellers on the literary market and seems to have been overlooked for rather a long while now. The question is this: Of the many lies (white or otherwise) that an author may tell in his rendering of a story, which kinds are forgivable and which are not? It's a serious breach of ethics if a journalist meddles with the types of details that James Frey did in his book A Million Little Pieces. However, Frey's book wasn't a piece of journalism—it was a literary work, and as such, it is not expected to adhere to the same strict laws. What's disturbing about Frey's case is not the fact that artistic license has been used, but instead, how it's been used.
Frey's dishonesty with such external details reveals dishonesty on deeper levels, the levels that form the very structure of literature's strange power to expose us to ourselves and to declare what is true. This kind of dishonesty stands in opposition to what Welty admires about Dillard's approach to memoir—the "ambition to feel."
In understanding his own calling as a writer, essayist Ted Solotaroff addresses the necessity for a fearless and fundamental honesty about the human experience in his work "A Few Good Voices in My Head." Solotaroff speaks of the education he received by reading Isaac Rosenfeld's essays, one of which "dealt with Sartre and the underground and began with the thought that modern writers like to believe they stand at a necessary remove from society, resisting, if passively, its disorder, amorality, and so forth."
Solotaroff is exhilarated when Rosenfeld "arraign[s] Sartre for taking the view from the café as the leading truths of existence. [A]t the time ... existentialism was everywhere in vogue. Yet here was Rosenfeld, in his calm, clear way, exercising his right, as he would say elsewhere, to 'take a good look' at the attitude with which Sartre approached experience and
to weigh it on a firm, moral scale."
In their meditations on writing, Dillard and Solotaroff point to the necessity for writers to steer clear of narcissism, to avoid becoming so repulsed or besotted with the "unmerited" result of the writing act that they are unable to remain true to the subject matter. Is it more insidious for a memoir writer to manipulate the particular details of his brother's death or to present a false attitude about how he dealt with the situation as a human being? If it begs the question, why does one write?, then the more salient question may be, why do we read?
Courtney Palmbush '00 works at Princeton. She hopes to enroll in an MFA writing program next year.