The Eternal Sunshine of the Memoir
Wellington Leg: At some point in the recent memoir scandal I began to wonder if fact checking is the problem. Journalists believe that publishers are simply too cheap to hire the professional eyes and ears required to perform the task of verifying an author’s credentials. In the latest example of faulty workmanship Margaret B. Jones hoisted Riverhead high above the dance floor with her memoir LOVE AND CONSEQUENCES. Misha Defonseca lied about her holocaust experience in her memoir wherein she claimed to be raised by wolves; not since Romulus and Remus founded Rome have wolves figured in a literary scandal.
I’m not sure how a fact checker might have approached a family of wolves to check for human offspring. Perhaps the telltale high school yearbook kept over the years by a sentimental wolf might prove revealing, a photo circled by a proud parent as if to say “that’s my girl the valedictorian.”
The ugly truth is we want to believe. Books are now an arrow in the self improvement quiver and if they don’t make us feel better about ourselves they have no value. This explains why these books cannot be acquired as novels; when based on actual events memoirs are better than amphetamines but when they are sold as fiction the promotion machine grinds to a stop.
Novels may or may not make us feel better. They could make us feel worse or use our imagination to interpret an allegory. Some of the best allegorical writing is reserved for assembly instructions and we’re tired of assembling bicycles at one in the morning: we want lives so ravaged by improbable tragedy that, by comparison, we’re having a fabulous time here on earth.
I imagine this scenario will play out again and again. Money is seductive and the memoir is the elixir we crave. If you were raised by a family of polar bears or a school of tiger sharks you better find a typewriter immediately. We want to be fooled again.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:53 am
“We want to be fooled again.”
Exactly. Agents and publishers, most of all. Look at the movie The Hoax. None of Clifford Irving’s publishers tried the simple expedient of contacting Howard Hughes’ representatives to see if he ever communicated with Irving. They didn’t inquire because they didn’t want to know different.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Peter, what intrigues me about your observation regarding Clifford Irving is the process of submitting work for publication. The only significant change in that process over the past 30 years is the role of the agent. Agents were incidental in Irving’s story. Today agents are integral to the submission acceptance process but it’s hard to say whether they are additive or whether they simply replicate roles abdicated by publishers in deciding which manuscripts are bought. If the latter is true then it’s a matter of outsourcing a function rather than evaluating merit which might lead a person to conclude that nothing has changed since Irving’s day.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Irving wrote a book all about his fake Hughes autobiography. As I haven’t read it, I can’t say who and how powerful an agent he had then.
It only seems like agents have become so much more important to the submission process than thity years ago. I think every writer becomes overly agent obsessed when they start submitting their first manuscript and this has a distorting, ahistorical view of the role of agents.
In Trial and Error, Jack Woodford’s how-to book for writers, he has a chapter on agents, and he wrote that book in 1933!
Agents definitely became more important post-WW II, as Raymond Chandler shows in his essay Ten Percent of Your Life.
Based on my reading of agent’s and editor’s insider accounts of publishing, agents today have replaced the salaried in-house readers at publishing companies of yesteryear. So, no, the effect is not additive.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I guess I wonder how a fake memoir progresses through the submission process today versus 1969 or 1970 when the Hughes autobiography was acquired from Clifford Irving. The agent is the presumptive first line of defense but my memory of agent interviews in these cases is that they are shocked, dismayed, perplexed when their clients confess all. My hunch is that literary agencies have fewer resources than publishers to check facts and agencies are not responsible for the decisions made by publishers.