100% True…or Double Your Money Back!
January 13th, 2006
Here’s a little anecdote for you, straight from the Life n’ Times of Derek C. F. Pegritz–that is, me–which will soon be showing up in my forthcoming memoirs, NONFICTION!
Back in The Day, I was prettymuch transparent, at least to the mate-seeking laser eyes of your typical early-20s single girl. After I’d had about ten or twelve tequila sunrises, I’d sliiiiiiiiiiide on up to one of them at the bar with my vintage ’70s wingcollar shirt unbuttoned just enough to show my single chest hair, my breath cool and Binaca-fresh as I’d hit them with my standard line, “Can I see your bruise? You know, the one you got when you fell out of heaven?”–and they’d just stare right through me as though I were made of transparent aluminum. Or slap me. Needless to say, no matter how hard I tried, freakin’ Beavis and/or Butt-head had a better chance of scoring than I did.
The statement above is 100% True. You have my word on it. Because…really, what possible reason could I have to tell a deliberate untruth of any sort in my writing? I mean, only completely and utterly honest people will take the time and effort to put their stories into writing, and, therefore, we can trust everything that’s written to be Actual Factual and verifiably true. This holds for both the Internet and the print world - doubly so, in fact, for the latter, thanks to the wonders of certain dedicated people known as “editors.”
You see, even if some author were to - god forbid! - stretch the truth a little bit or, worse, outright TELL A BLATANT LIE (though who in their right mind would do such a thing?), publishing houses are fortunately staffed by legions of cautious, hyperintelligent editors and fact-checkers whose entire careers are centered around being absolutely sure that their employers do not accidentally publish a tome riddled with factual errors or loathesome exaggerations. This is why you, as a consumer, can and, in fact, should believe anything you read if it’s been printed and distributed by the likes of, say, Random House. Random House and other American publishers have a truly Platonic dedication to The Truth, and would sooner fold up shop than ever deign to let a compilation of deliberate falsehoods slip through their presses onto bookstore shelves.
But…oh, dear - what if a mistake were to happen?! What if a book riddled with embellishments and other such obfuscations of The Truth were to somehow seep through a crack in the fact-checking bureaucracy and end up in the public sector, where its embellishments and obfuscations would naturally be mistaken for The Truth? And…and what if this book also happened to become extremely popular thanks, in part, to its being a featured selection of a famous talk show host’s book club? Why, it would only make sense for the publisher to do the responsible thing and offer a refund for those terrible, error-ridden texts!
You would, perhaps, expect to eventually encounter such a situation as described above if you lived in Perfect World, where Everything Is (Or At Least Should Be) As It Seems and everyone but a handful of acknowledged Bad People is blissfully enamoured of The Truth. But I hate to break it to you, folks - we live in the Real World, where people exaggerate, tell lies, and where, because of humanity’s propensity for never telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you can’t believe everything you read.
For example, my little anecdote that introduced this rant. It’s at least 99% true - but there is one small untruth in it: that I needed ten or twelve tequila sunrises to get my groove on with the ladies. In fact, I never needed more than five: if I drank twelve I’d be more likely to puke on a girl than to hit on her. But why would I bend the truth like that?
Because it makes the story a little bit more interesting, or entertaining. Exaggeration does that: it generates humor…as anyone familiar with Monty Python’s Flying Circus or the films of Adam Sandler will damn well know. Does it harm the story - or, worse, the reader - that I streeeeeeeeeetched The Truth just a little bit to make my brief little statement of Striking Out with the Ladies a bit more amusing? NO. Not one bloody bit.
Writers always play a little loose with the truth, even when writing biographies and autobiographies - and not always because they just want to spice up an otherwise average or pointless scene with a bit of hyperbolic pep. Sometimes writers make up out-right lies…to save face, perhaps, or just to include a scene or an event that in some way impacts the text they are writing positively.
Let’s take, for example, Vanilla Ice’s 1991 young-adult biography Ice by Ice, in which the then-popular rapper mentions that he got into a lot of trouble with street gangs when he was but a young’un growing up in da hood. That never friggin’ happened: Robert van Winkle grew up in a lily white upper-middle-class community; the worst trouble he probably ever encountered was being grounded when he got caught frenchin’ the neighborhood floozy in the back seat of his parents’ minivan. But you can’t be a smoove, thuggin’ white rapper if you don’t have some street cred, right? So he manufactured a bit of his image. What. A. Surprise. But well do I remember the stink that blew up when it was “discovered” - no doubt through the tireless muckraking of some Rolling Stone journalist obsessed with revealing the harshly un-harsh suburban truth of Vanilla’s past - that Herr Ice’s junior-G days were all bogus: you’d've thought he’d fabricated a tale of taking Madonna’s virginity in the spare bedroom of Paula Abdul’s mansion, or perjured himself before Congress concerning his role in the Iran-Contra Scandal. Goodlord…all he did was gussy up his past a bit to make his life story a little more interesting - a little more like what his fans already thought his teenybopper days were like. He didn’t have to alter or make up anything about his teenage motocross achievements, though, because such activities are, by definition, more interesting to readers than an account of how he made it through highschool with a B average.
Every personal biography and memoir ever written by a human being has contained some untruths in it. Hell, most of the time, they don’t even end up in the text intentionally. Human memory is a fallible thing, and any event recalled long after the fact will have undergone a certain amount of entropy in the mind, rendering it a less-than-perfect entity. Anyone with the merest dram of awareness will automatically know that you cannot believe wholeheartedly everything you read - ESPECIALLY when the words on the pages or screens before you are marked as being “true.”
But that doesn’t mean you can’t be inspired, or moved, by those words. Many people are touched by events and characters in popular novels: they’re inspired by the everyday trials and tribulations of Bridget Jones, the perspicacity of Sherlock Holmes, the suaveness of James Bond, and the homespun decency and bravery of Huck Finn. Every single event and deed in those novels was fiction - completely made-up - but how many kids were led to become FBI agents by Clarice Starling? Or to give up the smack by reading Requiem for a Dream?
It’s a lot easier to be inspired or moved by “actual” stories, of course, because…well, supposedly, those stories Actually Happened. Who hasn’t been stirred up in some way by reading the account of some real person’s triumph over adversity? But how much of that account was actually The Truth? Most of the time, there’s simply no way to tell unless you track down the author yourself, shoot him/her up with enough sodium pentothal to make Satan himself talk, hook the author up to a polygraph, and proceed with the ol’ twenty questions. You just choose to believe the story because it impacts your life somehow…and so what if something in it turns out to be an embellishment, right?
Not if you’re a reader of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, apparently. Frey’s memoir of drug addiction and rehab has been proclaimed one of the best books of 2005, and, as noted above, was chosen by the Mighty Oprah Winfrey as a featured selection for her Book Club. The book would’ve taken its turn in the spotlight, climbed up and then back down the Amazon.com best sellers’ chart, and promptly been forgotten by the General Public were it not for the fact that The Smoking Gun, a website run by Court TV, ran an article pointing out a number of factual errors in the book. In fact, the article alleges the author “wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw ‘wanted in three states.’”
Now, I haven’t read Frey’s book because junkie memoirs don’t really interest me–and I have even less interest in anything stamped with Oprah’s Book Club’s kiss of approval. But I have read The Smoking Gun’s expose on Frey’s exaggerations…and they seem to have, indeed, reliable information (garnered through perfectly legal means such as interviews and requested court documents) that exposes the fact that the author made some stuff up here and there, or “wildly embellished” some details.
To which I reply: Who cares?
First of all, Frey’s account is a personal memoir, in which he recounts various sordid and awful details of his own life NOT to slander others, but to illustrate his own personal hell and the means by which he escaped it to become sober for the past nine years of his life. He does not use falsehoods to injure or humiliate anyone but himself. Quite frankly, I think he exaggerated certain details of his story for one simple reason: to give his tale more impact, since he clearly intended the work to be a cautionary tale and…well, what good is a cautionary tale if it doesn’t shock you or alarm you into being cautious about something? So what if he fudges information to make himself seem like “more of a victim”? People do that: sometimes they lust after sympathy or pity, sometimes they do it to make their case more shocking and memorable for the benefit of others. When authors write books, they are not fundamentally interested in telling The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth - they are interesting in telling a story that will entertain and stick with people, that will catch like shrapnel in their audiences’ brains and not only sell a trillion copies but also remain in light. And most of the time, the actual truth of the story - however much the author carves TRUE STORY into its hide - will only form the seed from which the document grows.
James Frey is not writing a history book, or a book concerning string theory, or even a biography of some famous person. Factual details are fundamentally unimportant to the story he has to tell. The final impact of Frey’s tale of puke and pills and booze is not dependent on the veracity of the events depicted therein: it’s not the simple sum of its parts. A Million Little Pieces really could be compounded of a million little lies, but that does not detract in one bit from what the book is aiming to do, and that is depict the horror of an ex-junkie’s almost-wasted life. You get almost the same effect by reading Hubert Selby’s entirely fictitious Requiem for a Dream, but no one is demanding refunds from Random House because they discovered that something in Selby’s novel might not be 100% true.
The lesson here is simple, humans: Don’t take every word you read to be the Abject Truth, especially when it’s labelled “true story”. But that doesn’t mean that the words you read can’t have an impact on your life. The actual, meaningful “truth” of the words transcends the mere prosaic “truth” of their factual validity. Anyone demanding his or her money back from Random House because they were “duped” or “taken for a ride” by James Frey is a flat-out idiot who should, in fact, be fined by the Thought Police for egregious breach of common sense and criminal gullibility. And if you are one of said folks, and want to buy me a tequila sunrise at the bar some day for pointing out to you the stupidity of your ways, just think for a minute before you start pushing glasses my way. I might have already had my limit of five.
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