March 2008 Archives

The literary blogosophere is humming in the wake of the latest scandal surrounding a fake memoir, the middle-class, all-white, privately educated Margaret Seltzer's exploitation of violence, poverty, sexual abuse, and African American and Native American suffering, identity, and culture for her own ends.

And because of all that I'm reading on the topic, I need to disagree with one point in Mark Doty's "Bride in Beige:  A Poet's Approach to Memoir" in the latest issue of Poets & Writers.  A long-time admirer of Doty’s poetry and prose, I agree with and relish several of the points he makes, but I found myself drawn up short by this assertion regarding his book Firebird, a memoir I have happily taught:

. . . [S]ome memoirs are much more interested in the process and character of remembering than others; in these, it sometimes feels that memory itself is a form:  associative, elusive, metaphoric, metonymic.  Memory arranges sequences, heightens moments, makes the duration of some events vast or twinklingly brief, changes the colors or soundtrack or lighting of a scene in order to heighten emotion.

In other words, memory is an artist.  It fabricates.  It exaggerates.  Memory imagines—sometimes gorgeously—and memory lies.  I agree.  But "some memoirs," Doty claims nonjudgmentally, are simply "more interested" in those airy mental moves than in the facts that ground them.  He sees his own book as "allegiant to memory, not to history."  The key, for Doty, is capturing "the texture of subjectivity."

But that's a slippery slope, isn't it?  What about a memoirist, like Seltzer, whose subjectivity apparently includes a very high comfort level with deception and appropriation?  Or what about a memoirist whose subjectivity includes fantasies of having been a Jewish Holocaust survivor raised by wolves, as was the case with Misha Defonseca, who recently said,

The book is a story, it's my story. . . .  It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world.

Or what about even a well-meaning (I believe) memoirist like Ishmael Beah, whose subjective, traumatized, uncorroborated memory apparently took the liberty of expanding his time as a child soldier from months (at the age of fifteen) into years (beginning at age thirteen)?

Doty gives his own minor example of an overly creative memory:

In Firebird, I claim, for instance, that we lived . . . on Ramses Street.  It wasn't until I went back to Memphis after the book was published that I learned there was no such place.  But the town was named for an Egyptian city, and I'd been fascinated by mummies in a museum, and our front porch had fat, tapered columns just like the ones in the pictures of Luxor in my book of archaeology—so you can see how I got there.  Had I known that I was inventing this, I would have made that invention a part of my text, since the process of misremembering is itself revealing.  But I never looked at a map to try to confirm my memory, though I know there are memoirists who would.

Myself, I'm one of those pesky, pedestrian "memoirists who would."  I'm not sure what drove Doty to write Firebird, but in writing my own memoir, I had a lot at stake.  As a child, I had been accused of lying when I reported molestation, so I was already hesitant to speak out.  Moreover, my book reveals the inner workings of a little-understood religious sect and the private pathologies of an abusive home; I knew that some readers could be skeptical of and perhaps even hostile to those revelations.

So it was important to me, as my book went to press, that everything be strictly verifiable.  Though my book claims to be my story and my story alone, I understood that it might also be read as a social document, the way Ishmael Beah's story has been read as one way of gaining insight into the terrible, traumatized world of child soldiers.

Because I knew it would be read that way--and for the sake of other children suffering from abuse or religious manipulation--I wanted my book to stand not only as art but also as a reliable social document, which meant it had to be factual, corroborated, at every possible point.  To accomplish this—to include not only my own personal, subjective memories of events but also every feasible good-faith effort to verify them—I relied on maps, photo albums, a baby book in my mother’s hand, religious literature, files of legal documents, newspaper accounts, and, finally, my adult brother's corroboration and approval of what I'd written.  (So there was no sibling to come forward and reveal deception, as was the case with Seltzer.)

When an adapted excerpt from The Truth Book  was to run as the "Lives" column in the New York Times Magazine, the Times, burned by its own scandals, required me to FedEx a huge file of photocopied documents (including my parents' divorce decree from the 1970s) to verify every claim or allusion in the piece.  Their fact-checkers also called the relatives mentioned in the piece, in order to confirm the story.  They vetted everything.  Why can't publishing houses make a similar good-faith effort?

Doty’s essay continues: 

My interest was in how it felt to be that boy, in the world as he understood it, and that world is a construction, a set of associations tinged by obsessions and fascinations, a landscape as interior as it is external.  It is, in other words, a poem.

Ah, a poem.  Sorry to be pedestrian and literal in my capitulation to generic categories imposed by publishers, but the back cover of my copy of Firebird says "BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY," not "POETRY."  Maybe that's the space Doty's carving out for his practice of memoir here, and we can agree to disagree.  But I have to wonder, too, about the bottom line. 

Because we can all write dreamy, unverified reminiscences, and we can publish them, too.  There's a whole category for them; it's called autobiographical fiction, and its practitioners are legion and canonically esteemed.   But the bottom line is that, today, if your book is pitched as fiction or poetry, it won't sell as well in our current reality-TV publishing market.  And money seems to have an awful lot to do with the most egregious scandals. A whole lot of dollars have been changing hands for these non-memoirs and inaccurate memoirs.  Over a million for James Frey's Oprah-endorsed book, if I’m remembering correctly; about a million for Ishmael Beah's; something close to but "less than $100,000" for Seltzer's.  Misha Defonseca stood to gain an additional $22.5 million, had her fraud not been exposed.

So enough with the rationalizations, already.

"I just felt that there was good that I could do," said Margaret Seltzer in an interview after the story broke.  Oh, really?