Ye Gads, When Will It End?

On September 27, 2005 I published a blog called Sad, Depressing Books With No Redeeming Value. It is still one of my blog posts that gets a lot of traffic --- especially lately. This week another book was revealed to be a hoax, Margaret B. Jones’ Love or Consequences. It is another tragedy riddled book about an abandoned bi-racial girl raised by a foster family and her descent into drug use and gang violence and other heart-string yanking baloney. This written by a privileged girl from Sherman Oaks who once met a guy who belonged to a gang. Aye-yi-yi.

Coming fast on the heels of the Misha Defonseca story it has caused a lot of rumblings among the public about why publishers don’t do a better job of fact-checking these stories before they publish them. I’ve pontificated here before about why that is not a publisher’s responsibility. If an author signs a contract stating that the content of their book is true and autobiographical as Misha Defonseca did that is as much as a publisher is required to do. There are a lot of gray areas in this that bother me a lot. If publishers become responsible for vetting the truth of everything they publish how much poetic license and creativity will then be allowable in non-fiction/memoirs? For instance if I publish my memoir and say my fourth grade teacher was the sweetest, warmest, kindest teacher I ever had and someone else takes issue with that and claims she was a vicious, cruel, vindictive shrew whose evil looks caused them to spend years in therapy --- well, now what?

But even more importantly is why in the blue blazes do we suck these things up? The truth is that Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust was a good read and so, I have heard, is Love or Consequences. Why weren’t they published as fiction? The movie, Survivre avec les loups is said to be extremely beautiful and inspiring. But, of course, it now suffers from the stigma that it is based on lies (not that I think that will hurt it at the box office). There are two things that occur to me.

In one sense I think it is pure egotism on the part of the authors. They want to gather all the emotional percs that come with being held up as a model of what it means to survive a horrible ordeal. They want people to come up to them and say, “I admire you so much --- you are such an inspiration” instead of, “hey, cool story”. It’s that attention thing. There are a good many readers who say with a certain amount of misguided pride, “Oh, I never read fiction --- it’s just something somebody made up.” The utter ignorance of that remark sets my teeth on edge but I digress.

The other thing is that there is a pitiful and regrettable truth that non-fiction is easier to sell than fiction is --- probably because of reasons stated above but even more because there is a distasteful tendency on the part of many readers to want to read something that will leave them thinking, “Whew, my life might not be perfect but at least it’s not that screwed up.”

So, now that the public is aware that there is no shortage of baloney being passed off as truth what will their reaction be --- besides blaming the publishers? Maybe it’s time to take a look at why these books have become so popular. This entire “memoir” genre has been going on for quite awhile now and has spawned a lot of godawful junk. I wonder if someone were to research the “It” boy books how accurate they would prove to be. James Frey and Laura Albert/J.T. Leroy were exposed as fabricating their stories and yet the genre persists. It baffles me.

The question I keep asking is what is wrong with publishing these stories as fiction? It’s as simple as that. Had any of those books been published as fiction all this brouhaha could be avoided. Or is it that we love the brouhaha? We love the angst of the stories when we believe them to be real and we love the melodrama around their expose. Sigh.

Give me a novel any day --- I don’t have the emotional energy for that other stuff.

Thanks for reading.