?? would Oprah rip Don into a million little pieces ??

Published by bryan | Filed under Don Answers your ???s

Don,

With the recent controversy in the news (and on Oprah) surrounding the fabrications, distortions and lies in James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” I have found myself wondering how “Blue Like Jazz” would stand up to a similarly rigorous examination.

From my reading, BLJ does present itself as a memior or even a spiritual autobiography, as such I really hope that the events recorded in the book are true to life and not fictional or partly fictional. If it was important in Frey’s case, it’s all the more important with respect to BLJ.

Would you and do you stand by the truth of the various stories and events you recount? For example, is your summer with the hippies and practice of living off of food found in recently vacated hotel rooms true? Would you be willing to submit the story to a fact-checking investigation by an independent source like “the smoking gun”?

I would assume the reason why the book’s events being actually (and not just “dramatically” or “in some sense”) true is really important is something that is pretty obvious and that you wouldn’t dispute that importance?

[i.e. Imagine if we were to find out that Augustine just added the child’s voice saying “pick up and read” for dramatic effect or that he didn’t really open the Bible to where he said he did!]

Antwon

Antwon,

I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with Greg Spencer at Westmont about this same subject. Spencer defines a lie as anything you say to get people to believe something you know to be untrue. I like that definition, but also think there is artistic freedom when writing anything, even history or a memoir. Before anybody gets unsettled, let me explain. To recreate a conversation in a book, you cant recreate the exact conversation, because that conversation will go for pages and pages and will be incoherent and, worse, incredibly boring. In a book, you do not have facial expressions and hand gestures and this sort of thing. Also, in a book, the readers mind does not have the ability to follow a narrative or a dialogue that wanders and stammers and um’s and so forth. Record your next dinner conversation, then write it up as a transcript, and you will see what I mean. That said, my job in writing a memoir is to faithfully account the truth, in book form. Did the conversations in Blue Like Jazz happen? Yes, sort of. I had to capture the essence of dialogue. This means that ideas which may have taken five conversations, at five locations, and did not follow a linear thought line, had to be given treatment for a book. I assure you this is true in every book you read, unless you are reading said transcript from your recent dinner party. As for Blue Like Jazz, the characters exist, the events happened, the conclusions were arrived at, and all of this. About twenty different people had to sign legal papers releasing the information as accurate. Plus, there really isn’t anything in the book very “amazing” anyway. It’s more of a heart journey than an edge-of-your seat thriller.

Still, as a writer, I feel creative freedom at times. In Searching for God Knows What, for example, I mention that an Alien came and visited my roommate Grant and I, and Adam and Eve also showed up and were included in the conversation. Did this happen? No. But I also know I am being so absurd the reader will know I am being absurd to illustrate an idea. The entire first chapter of that book is completely fabricated. I shouldn’t say completely, because it is based very loosely on an event that happened, and yet I felt no need to explain this to the reader, because it is absurd, the character narrating the story is absurd, and it is hopefully funny. And yet in the next chapter I go right back into actual truth. I think the difference is I created the first chapter to illustrate, as humorously as possible, an idea, and then started into my own story. I did not feel the need to explain this to the reader for a couple reasons…1. I was not lying to get the reader to think more of me. 
In fact, it is quite absurd. and 2. My point or “truth” if you will had nothing to do with the narrative and everything to do with the idea I was illustrating. The chapter was true, then, but in the Homeric sense.

But what about James Frey? A Million Little Pieces has a lot of people very angry. The truth about that book is that Frey wanted to release it as fiction, but the publisher convinced him to release it as memoir as it was based on his life story. Frey, a first time author, said yes, as most people would. He then found himself in a world of trouble. His mistake was not releasing the book with exaggerations, then, it was in allowing the publisher to call it a memoir. Personally, I am not offended or shocked or appalled at all. Who really cares? Has any significant damage been done? Give me a break, people. The people who are angry at James Frey are angry for one reason, they got conned. They got tricked, and spent thirteen bucks on a book and now they are out thirteen bucks. Are you serious? Thirty-thousand children die each day from poverty-related conditions and Americans are mad because a writer told lies about his personal life. Get a life, people.

Now let me also say something about literary devices. The literary devices we understand in a western context are very limited. There are unwritten rules, if you will. A memoir is to be true, a novel is to be fiction or imagination. This has not always been the case. In the book of Job, for example, the writer employs parallelism, an ancient form of Hebrew poetry. The writer narrates the story, then gets to a part where he wants to express Job’s deep emotional feeling, and breaks into poetry, saying “I wish I was never born, cursed is my mothers womb” and so on and so on. The modern western mind reads this and believes Job actually said this and the text is a historical account. I mean, the Bible actually says this is what Job said. But the Hebrew mind, when reading the original text, would know that because the writer has broken into poetry, he is actually 
putting words into Job’s mouth, using an art form to paint a picture of a “greater truth.” The writer, then, is getting to the deeper truth, do you see? Now, many people believe Job actually broke out into poetry, but I find this absurd. Job did not break out into poetry, especially poetry that was a “literary device” and was incredibly calculated and thought-through. That would make Job a very, very strange man. So, we have an enormous number of Christians who subscribe to the idea Job actually spoke in poetry because they are defending THEIR idea of how truth should be told, not the idea agreed upon by the original recipients of the document. This, I 
believe, is arrogant. In essence, we are saying “God communicated truth as WE understand it, and to hell with the billions who came before us and had a different framework for understanding the complexity of truth!”

Here is why I say all this. Literary devices are changing, and they are changing back to a style which we see employed in many books of the Bible, including the books of Moses and Song of Songs. If any group of people should understand these devices, it should be Christians. And yet we defend a post-enlightenment, western, black-and-white, grid style of literature as the only method of communicating truths. We are going to have to get over it.

How is this playing out in literature, and where is it showing up? The answer is, in many places. Here are some popular examples: David Sedaris writes non-fiction essays and many of us have read his books. They are quite funny. Sedaris, however,  often breaks into absurdity to get laughs. His mother, in one of his essays, runs over a rabbit in her car, and when she gets out to check on the rabbit, the rabbit stands up and cusses her out. Sedaris does not feel the need to explain that the rabbit didn’t actually stand up and cuss his mother out. He is being funny, and if the reader gets it, the reader gets it, and if the reader doesn’t, Sedaris feels no responsibility to help him. He can do what he wants. It is his book and his story. Another example would be Edward Morris’ biography of Ronald Reagan, in which Morris writes a non-fiction account of the Presidents life 
by inventing a character and having that character be a lifelong friend of Reagan, interacting with actual events in the President’s life. It was a great book, and a very creative idea. Was I angry about Morris’ creative methodology to account for a true history? No, the author was forthright from the beginning. But what if Morris wasn’t? Well, if we say he would be in the wrong, we also have to criticize God for not penning an authors note at the front of Job, or for that matter explaining the dialogue discrepancies in the gospels.

I appreciated that Morris was willing to break out of categories in an effort to paint a “greater truth.” And I have no problem with God using poetry to paint a picture of a greater emotional truth that couldn’t be arrived at by stating the mere facts. The difference between Morris and Frey, however, is Frey, of course, let people believe the text was true, and also exaggerated the text for his own glory, rather than to illustrate an idea. And that, my friend, makes Oprah angry.

Those are just some camera angles on the issue. It is certainly complex, and I don’t believe there are black and white answers. But, I should, in consideration of your question, be more telling in regards to the specific inquiry about Blue Like Jazz. It is true, and if the Smoking Gun were to care enough to launch an investigation to find out if I actually lived in the woods with hippies, I suspect they could find traces of my urine, ten years aged, at the base of a certain Aspen tree in a small meadow outside Black Butte Ranch. But I will never reveal the exact location!!!

Thanks Antwon. All the best to you.

Don

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