I saw your post on PfP. It sounds as if the author is well intentioned, though a bit naive. The introduction of a secular curriculum, however limited, has to be a positive influence.
Ours is a very redneck county and does not even have a leash law.
The Chicago metropolitan area has its share of rednecks. They are allowed to run free in the city but must be leashed in the suburbs. :)
Some well placed outrage:
Why you should be enraged by literary liars
They show a 'profound disrespect' for readers
By Samantha Dunn
March 9, 2008
"Love and Consequences" author Margaret B. Jones has lied and made money from the lie. This, culturally speaking, doesn't make her exceptional in the least (Enron, anyone?). Yet fabricating an entire life and going to pains to pass it off as your own is, admittedly, a whopper. James Frey's similar memoir stunt in "A Million Little Pieces" ranks in the bush league compared to Jones' invented gang life -- at least he really is a drunk.
Alas, the revelation that Jones made up her entire memoir has now provoked the same tedious rhetorical arguments that popped up when the Frey hoopla hit the press: "Does it matter if a story is literally true if it expresses emotional truths?" "What is truth, after all?" You know, the kind of talk that might be relevant, even fruitful, to engage in during a Philosophy 101 course. In all of this one, question keeps being overlooked: What is a memoir supposed to be, anyway?
We are free as artists relative to the medium within which we choose to express ourselves. While all literature ultimately serves the same purposes, each form -- be it fiction, playwriting, poetry and yes, memoir -- makes different demands of the writer. Poetry, for example, has been described as a "self-resisting" form because it tries to express through words the points of human experience that often defy language; a poet friend of mine, Garth Greenwell, talks about choosing to work within the form because he likes the way trying to write a poem changes the way he thinks.
Memoir too is a unique form. Although I fear today it has come to be viewed as a lesser endeavor on the literary scale, fit for the freakish, the wounded, the egomaniacal and those who lack the writing talent for, well, anything else. It is actually meant to be a very demanding form, distinct from others, growing from what is at its root a contemplative tradition. St. Augustine's "Confessions," written around the turn of the 5th century, was not the first autobiographical account ever written, but it did define the memoir -- examining the paradoxes within a personality, the rough edges where we don't make sense, least of all to ourselves.
Through the ages, great minds like Jean Jacques Rousseau, father of the French Revolution, have further elevated what is possible in the form; modern virtuosos like Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion and others too numerous to mention have made indelible stylistic contributions.
Although trends in the actual craft of composing come and go, memoir at its best comes down to the writer wrestling with the meaning he has made from his life. The very form is self-questioning, reflective of the mental process. The dramatic turn within a memoir does not rely on external action but on the insight the writer draws about himself and his place in the world. As Vivian Gornick has written, "the way the narrator . . . sees things is, to the largest degree, the thing being seen." At its worst, memoir becomes a pedantic exercise in solipsism; at its best, it becomes transcendent, the most personal insight illuminating something about the entire human condition.
This is why I am so irked -- angry -- no, now enraged -- by the assertion that "well, if it's a good story what does it matter?" Of course it matters on a variety of ethical and legal levels. At the level of literature, it matters not only because actively deceiving shows profound disrespect for the reader, but also because the writer has also completely failed the entire point of engaging in the form of memoir itself. A large part of the challenge of creating a meaningful memoir is that it is circumscribed by facts: Let's see, I've got two sticks, a rock, a piece of red silk thread and a Polaroid picture, what of beauty can I fashion from all this?
Of course, in the process of constructing their works memoirists are free -- no, required -- to imagine, to wonder, to hypothesize, to pontificate occasionally and even to exaggerate. The only requirement is that the writers make the readers aware of what they're doing. How? It's called craft. A great story based or not based on fact? That's called fiction. It's a beautiful form. Very difficult to do well. Perhaps we should spell it out: f-i-c-t-i-o-n.
What disheartens me is how little all of this is understood even within the publishing industry; I can't tell you the number of times I have heard editors, publicists and agents use the terms "memoir" and "novel" interchangeably. (It's true that several hundred years ago "fictitious memoirs" were all the rage in England and the Colonies and influenced the development of the modern novel, but there have been many developments in literature since then.) What is even more disheartening is how many know the distinction and don't care. Nonfiction overall sells better than fiction, end point.
Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that I speak with some experience. Although I began my writing career as a journalist, I've published a novel, short stories, essays and two memoirs. I'm now at work on my third, because along the way I fell in love with the challenge of memoir; for me it's like walking a tightrope without a net. However, I've experienced the awkward silence after telling my agent, "I think this next book may be a novel." I imagine the sigh of relief when I am drawn to yet another nonfiction work.
Another tidbit: Henry Holt & Co., publisher of my first two memoirs, never once asked for any backup material. Never, to my knowledge, was my work even vetted by an attorney. The message I took was that if I was willing to stick my neck out, they would publish the work -- it was right there in the contract that they were immune from liability.
This is a long way to say that, yes, the publishing world is complicit in the current upheaval around memoirs. But ultimately the burden is borne by the writers of these bogus works. They have failed utterly. They have failed the reader. They have failed to live up to the requirements of the form. Indeed at some level we all fail in the pursuit of any artistic challenge. But to not even attempt the challenge, to actively deceive and to reap benefits is abominable. *
Samantha Dunn is the author of the memoirs "Faith in Carlos Gomez," "Not by Accident" and "Failing Paris." She teaches memoir writing in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
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