In 2006, 21st century literature was put through a struggle session on American television. In the public pillory was James Frey, author of the misery memoir A Million Little Pieces, which one critic had declared, “the War and Peace of addiction”. The success of Frey’s book was exponentially boosted by its selection as one of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club choices, practically guaranteeing its place in innumerable shop windows, displays and book clubs not just across the Anglosphere but the world (it was translated into 29 different languages). He was one of the chosen ones, and accordingly the book sold millions. The attention, however, would be a double-edged sword.
It’s hard to quantify what a bad book is but you know one when you read it. Frey was smart enough to avoid some of the self-pitying cliches of the form but not the swamp of sentimental gloop that underlies every fallen tough-guy act on the page. The book is histrionic to the point where the only enjoyment I could salvage was to hear the clipped portentous sentences (“I am blinded by blackness. I am gone […] My eyelids fall”) in the voice of Charlton Heston’s incarnation of Moses in The Ten Commandments. It is resplendent in self-absorption yet bereft of self-awareness. Above all, there is something about the tone, or the voice that doesn’t ring true, especially if you have some knowledge of those junk-sick netherworlds. The implausibilities begin from the first paragraph with Frey, confused and clattered in various bodily fluids, making it through the check-in queue with no knowledge of doing so, only to awake on the flight with this suspect peach of an opener, “How did I get here?” It’s all too neat, convenient, theatrical, and reads like how someone would imagine a drug story to be. The publishers fell for it, maybe because this is how, from a safe and insulated distance, they imagine that lifestyle to be.
The Smoking Gun had suspicions and published the article “A Million Little Lies”, claiming a great deal of the fearlessly verité nonfiction account was fabricated. Having been exalted on Oprah’s show, Frey was all of a sudden rumbled a la Eyes Wide Shut and ominously summoned back, a different kind of gaze now upon him. “I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you,” Oprah began, “because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.” Much of what follows is painful to watch, though also far more compelling and hilarious than A Million Little Pieces.
The most astonishing comments, though, came not from the author but his publisher Nan A. Talese, who cited the book’s “authenticity” as the reason she bought the manuscript. Authenticity was the very quality that it lacked. However, its phoniness went undetected. Another revelatory line came courtesy of Oprah who was aghast that the collapse in ethics might facilitate, god forbid, the dystopian scenario that “anybody can just walk in off the street with whatever story they have and say this is my story”. The reality is that stories from the edges of obliteration are by their nature chaotic, compromised, and rife with lies and indignities, all of which would be infinitely more “authentic” than the abject display of false virtue witnessed on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in the performative book it first championed and later denounced.
“This is my truth,” Nye Bevan used to say, “tell me yours.” This points to the crucial subjectivity of memory, the very basis of memoir, but also demonstrates an openness and unwillingness to police others, acknowledging the ambiguities and contradictions with which we each imbue our real stories of the past, frailties that we do not afford others. Interviewing two of my aunts while researching an event they experienced during the Irish Troubles, I watched a spirited conversation erupt about the veracity of a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, a detail so slight I cannot recall what it was. Each swore her version was true. And at no point did I believe either was lying. This kind of honest ambivalence is normally unwelcome in literary circles, where authenticity is not something you embody; instead, it is something you sell. What is required by the industry (for it is more industry now than art) is agony followed by redemption. The deeper and more salacious the turmoil experienced, the greater the pleasure aroused in a voyeuristic reader.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn might seem to be at the other end of the spectrum from the detumescent machismo of A Million Little Pieces. Yet they share more than the disgrace in which they are mired. The Salt Path is a more agreeable elegiac read, mainly because nature is an endless repository of poetry and can be leaned on when talent or vision is wanting. The book about a middle-aged couple, one with a terminal diagnosis, who are evicted from their Arcadian home and then take to the road, sold over two million copies and has recently been adapted as a movie.
Again, success brought unwanted attention. Self-regard and an inclination towards pomposity are not unusual to memoirs, but using the opening lines of The Odyssey as an epigraph is inviting trouble. The book is touching at times but cloying at others. It wobbles in its encounters with others that feel unlikely, the language and sentiments unnatural. As in Frey’s book, there’s a lot of occasionally ludicrous self-mythologising. Where his was mock-infernal, hers is mock-Edenic. Its arc, like Frey’s, is one of formulaic redemption, despite both feigning to deny it. Is this the message required by a publishing industry whose design is to entertainingly soothe or even sedate, rather than genuinely illuminate?
A newspaper investigation, by Chloe Hadjimatheou for The Observer, has questioned numerous aspects of Winn’s story, from their financial conduct to the gravity of Moth’s illness. Winn has denied the accusations, and defended the veracity of the “physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives”. We may never know what is true and false. Intriguing, though, is the sense of betrayal currently reverberating through the literary establishment, a grievance that perhaps tells us more about the aggrieved than anything else.
The affront Frey and Winn seem to have caused among the literati is not merely that they may have told half-truths. On the surface, there are genuine and well-placed concerns that nonfiction must be objective and verifiable. Memoir is, however, reliant on memory, which is subjective and unreliable. And they have exposed the whole misery memoir genre for what it is: a money-spinning opportunity and an exercise in trauma porn. The outrage is partly down to the fact publishers paid for the tender delicacy of suffering and were cheated out of it. The gladiatorial battle they were baying for was only a rigged wrestling match. The authors in question will be treated as aberrations, in order that the publishing industry, which has courted and encouraged tall tales, continue to appear noble. Yet the adage “don’t hate the player, hate the game” remains evergreen. There will be PR motivated calls for due diligence, of course. But will there be any calls for a vampiric industry to examine its own motives?
I know the publishing game fairly well, having written a memoir several years ago about growing up during the Troubles. It was based around an Oulipo idea of Georges Perec, whereby stories are told via objects. I called the book Inventory after the list of objects that made up my chapters — a deliberate double meaning, an admission that there was always going to be some degree of invention to the creative process. I would be an unreliable narrator, even to myself. Objective facts were sacrosanct, especially the dead, but interpretations and recollections inevitably varied. Leaning into this uncertain complexity felt more truly representative of the political and social fabrications that surround us. A memoir does not and cannot recreate the past but instead creates a simulacrum of it. “Memory,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.”
In writing about Northern Ireland, I was quite aware of what I was undertaking. There is a cultural omertà there (“the tight gag of place,” as Seamus Heaney called it); writers are regarded as something between a spokesperson, a thief, a liar and a snitch. And every time I tried to approach the topics of conflict, division, poverty etc, people (including family members) would become understandably protective, territorial and evasive. So I braced myself for the inevitable backlash after it was published, which of course occurred. The last lines of “24 Hours from Tulsa” regularly replay in my head: “I can never, never, never go home again.” And it was my own fault for stirring up what had been laid to rest stirred and for piercing coping mechanisms. After a year of barely speaking to my father because of my book, no sooner had I helped to place his coffin in the hearse than I felt a tap on the shoulder from someone who wanted to discuss something I’d written in it. And it struck me how unprepared most writers are, how little counsel the industry gives, and how many of my writer friends have been encouraged to tell a certain exposing type of story, to publish and be damned. And, sure enough, they have been damned.
It fits with a wider trend whereby working-class, ethnic minority, gay, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent writers are expected to write (and sometimes only permitted to write) about those “issues”, while those higher up the social hierarchy are allowed free rein to write about anything. Marginalised identity and trauma are currency. In my case, I’d ended up writing Inventory after my previous book Imaginary Cities had caught the attention of mainstream publishers. Many were keen to listen to my ideas for half a dozen books in that spirit. Nevertheless, virtually all came to the conclusion that the Troubles were all I was fit to write about. It didn’t matter if I had an audience or a voice for something entirely different. I had to stay in the box assigned to me. My compromise was to try and expand the box as much as possible — hence the Oulipo approach — but the box remains and has ever since. So long as the desires for comfort, virtue, redemption, consolation and the status quo prevail, actual authenticity will always be of secondary importance. This is primarily because truth isn’t pretty or palatable. Orwell was onto something when he wrote, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
No one has done more to establish that redemption-fixated literature which clogs up the bestseller lists than Oprah Winfrey. How appropriate to see her at the wedding of Jeff Bezos, whose company has caused the extinction of countless independent bookshops. It made me realise that the televised struggle session between Oprah and Frey had not been about justice. It was a humiliation ritual, and a cleansing on behalf of an exploitative cultural establishment.
For it’s one thing to lie in a book, it’s quite another to sustain an industry on untruths. And the deception reaches all the way down the foodchain to the bookshops Amazon hasn’t yet managed to wipe out. Having worked at a succession of them over the years, I know that the more corporate and mainstream they are, the more corrupt they tend to be. Only one example of this is handselling, whereby a customer would ask booksellers for personalised recommendations. At stores across the nation, there were tally sheets hidden below the counter, encouraging us to sell one of a handful of preordained titles from on high. Deals had been struck with publishers for discounts and favourable terms, if we pushed these orchestrated “word-of-mouth” successes: targets had to be hit.
All of the chosen books were on characteristically middlebrow themes, to the point it felt like social engineering. Each store competed with others to sell the most and managers would drag booksellers over the coals for not hitting quotas. In this way, aided by a cliquish literary criticism industry, the success of certain books has been astroturfed, and an orthodoxy is implanted where characters are always good at heart, life is some centrist fantasy, and narrators find the flattering lessons they want to find — with some quarantined space set aside for the more uncouth writers to flog their trauma and identities. This is what the audience wants, publishers claim, despite the fact that the entire scenario has been covertly manufactured and readers have been duped.
In such an environment you will always get grifters and the sloppy ones will be scapegoated to legitimise it all. Pearls will be clutched over deceptive practices but the appetite and the grift will remain, for as long as publishing remains so unrepresentative of how most people live in this country. Until that hermetically sealed publishing world democratises, fictional nonfiction will always be incentivised and will always reappear. And readers will be forced to be voyeurs and then jurors rather than being allowed the freedom of reading writers who are allowed to be writers.
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Author: Darran Anderson
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