While all autobiographers take liberty with the truth, the controversy surrounding James Frey’sA Million Little Piecesunderscores ethical questions of how far writers of nonfiction should go, says a West Virginia University professor and scholar of autobiography.
All autobiographers are unreliable narrators, and all humans are liars to various degrees, and yet issues of authenticity and accuracy in autobiography continue to present legal, ethical, narrative and practical problems for readers, writers and publishers,said Timothy Dow Adams, chair of the WVU English Department and author ofTelling Lies in Modern American Autobiography.
A Million Little Piecesbecame a best seller after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her nationwide book club. The Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site, and other news outlets have questioned the truthfulness of the book about Frey’s drug addiction and alcoholism. On Thursday, the author appeared on Winfrey’s talk show and admitted to fabricating details about characters and embellishing some events recounted in the book.
Controversies about lying in autobiography have long been common, said Adams, who has written extensively about the subject. They include the legal battle between Mary McCarthy, author ofMemories of a Catholic Girlhood,and Lillian Hellman, whose three autobiographers were challenged by McCarthy onThe Dick Cavett Show.
Other American autobiographies whose truth value has been challenged include Gertrude Stein’sThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,Richard Wright’sBlack Boy,Sherwood Anderson’sA Story-Teller’s Storyand Ernest Hemingway’sA Moveable Feast,he added.
Modern authors, such as W.G. Sebald in his novelsThe EmigrantsandAusterlitz ,frequently combine fact and fiction to produce fictive autobiographies or biographies that include within their fictional structure such actual documents as photographs, postcards or newspaper clippings, Adams explained.
Many contemporary writers deliberately make use of a literary technique in which fictive facts are combined with factual fiction to create in the reader a sense of authenticity,Adams said.These authors want to have it both waysthey want the inventiveness and narrative flow of fiction and the immediacy and authority of nonfiction.
As is true of all autobiographers, they want to tell their stories with artistry and integrity, seeking to balance the natural impulse to reveal and conceal at the same time,he added.While no memoir could withstand the intense scrutiny now being applied toA Million Little Pieces’without revealing some fictionalizing, the larger ethical questions have to do with the degree of alteration, the author’s motivations and the nature of the material.
Adams is available to comment on the Frey book controversy at 304-293-3107 ext. 33399.