What if I told you that back in the mid-90s, the most influential local television station in the country was basically run by a bunch of drugged-up kids; that several members of the staff regularly engaged in a weekend ritual of drinking, ecstasy use and sex without boundaries; that this behavior would eventually lead to one man betraying his best friend, the very public break-up of an office marriage and the tragic and mysterious death of a popular young producer?
Would you believe this?
What if I told you about a hot-shot TV wunderkind who lived in Los Angeles and did heroin while his marriage crumbled; a guy who was forced to leave L.A. and check into a public rehab facility on the other side of the country; a guy who found himself taken care of by a gruff but good-natured biker who was beaten up in jail just a few days after leaving rehab; a guy who was discharged, drug free, just a few days before September 11th, 2001 and -- with nothing to lose -- drove to New York City immediately after the 9/11 attacks, wound up living in a hotel for five months and rebuilding his life in the shadow of the worst disaster the country had ever seen?
Would you believe this?
What if I told you about a beautiful woman, a half-white, half-Indian gangland drug runner who grew up a foster child in predominately black South Central Los Angeles; who learned the ways of the streets by being a witness to and a participant in a gang war that was the foundation of the most notorious era of violence in L.A.'s history?
Believe this?
How about the tale of a young Jewish girl who grew up in the Warsaw ghetto and whose parents were deported by the Nazis during World War II, forcing her to undertake a treacherous two-thousand mile journey across war-torn Europe; a girl who killed a German soldier in self-defense and inevitably survived only after being adopted by a pack of wolves.
Would you believe this story -- any of these stories?
When I was a teenager, I would usually write only when ordered to by my teachers. I figured I had better things to do with my time than sit at a typrewriter for hours, or worse, pull out a pad and pencil and put myself in a position where I would later have to decipher my own handwriting; whatever magic I might inadvertently create always had to be weighed against the havoc I could wreak running over parking meters on the beach or joining friends as they embarked on late-night missions to steal cows from Miami Lakes and tie them up in the front yards of various homes across town. Although I was considered "creative" -- I drew constantly and had played the drums since I was five -- I rarely channeled my artistic tendencies onto the page.
But when I did -- on those isolated occasions that required me to put pen to paper -- I went fucking nuts.
The stuff I wrote was lengthy -- always clocking in well past the limit set by the teacher; it was typically complex, occasionally imaginative, unrepentantly adult (in addition to using four-letter words wherever I saw fit, I would sometimes add disturbing or beautiful imagery if I felt it fit the story); my papers were usually late, the result of an adolescent version of Kubrikesque perfectionism, but I wasn't often penalized simply because when an assignment finally did find its way to the teacher's desk, he or she could be assured that it was at least, well, interesting. One story revolved around a rescue operation into hell; another told Beowulf and Grendel from Grendel's perspective (I had no idea that what I thought was a clever concept had already been done); still another was a satire eviscerating the principal of the school for not only failing to follow through on promises made to students and parents but for attempting to cover up the drinking problem of a teacher then throwing that teacher under the bus once it came to light.
During this time I read voraciously, and although I didn't consider myself a writer by any means, I came across a description of the way writers think that would stick with me throughout my life. Stephen King said a writer, obviously, tells stories, and that he or she rarely looks at a situation without contemplating not simply the way to relay it later but how the reality itself might possibly be made better -- the "what if?"
In other words, writers are bullshit artists.
But does that excuse the ones who are outright liars, and is there even a difference between the two?
Within the past week, two "non-fiction" authors -- one who penned a best-selling memoir and another who wrote a memoir that was just released to rave reviews -- have been exposed as frauds. Each essentially admitted that she made the whole thing up. If this scenario sounds familiar, it should by now: I doubt anyone will soon forget the public shaming James Frey endured a couple of years back when the horrific ordeal he chronicled in his wildly successful addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, turned out to be 95% fantasy. In addition to incurring the wrath of the readers he duped, Frey also managed to commit the cardinal sin of pissing off Oprah, the person to whom he owed most of his success to begin with. She -- like the rest of America -- was initially shocked and awestruck by Frey's tale of beating up cops, doing hard time, and undergoing oral surgery without an anesthetic. Admittedly, Frey sold his own alternate history with conviction; he created a bad-ass personal mythology that was practically bulletproof (at least until Oprah made him cry on national television) and seemed to truly believe that he was the character he had invented. He bought into his own lie. As strange as this may sound, to this day he probably has no idea why he did what he did. The excuses he rattled off when cornered sounded like hastily concocted nonsense, and not simply because he had already proven himself a liar; the reality that Frey couldn't admit to was that he just wanted to make a more interesting story out of his own life and couldn't begin to explain why he didn't think there was anything wrong with labeling the result non-fiction.
What's interesting though is this: Looking back on A Million Little Pieces now, with the curtain pulled aside and the truth exposed, we have no choice but to question how so much of it ever got past the bullshit meter to begin with -- how we were so damn gullible.
Did the good in us simply want to believe? Did we assume that a story so fantastical had to have been vetted by the publisher? Did we convince ourselves that honesty, integrity and a reader's best interests were of paramount concern to a publishing house (rather than the bottom line)?
And when the truth came out, did we tell ourselves never again -- that the next time we wouldn't be so quick to fall victim to an author's vivid imagination and delusions of grandeur.
If the anwer to that last question is yes, then how did two more memoirists manage to put one over on the newly bullshit-proof masses?
Of the four premises I mentioned earlier, the latter two are the storylines of Love and Consequences by Margaret Jones and Mischa: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca respectively. Both authors now find themselves disgraced after admitting that they made up their life stories. Jones's harrowing tale of coming of age on the streets of South Central L.A. and learning about gang warfare firsthand was written at a Starbucks in the Valley -- where the writer grew up the daughter of a middle-class family; Defonseca's whimsical story of Nazis and wolves was debunked by a genealogical researcher from Massachusetts -- but not before it became a best-seller, was made into a movie, and made its author a fortune. Even at first glance, it doesn't seem like it would take a cynic to question the authenticity of Defonseca's story at the very least. Hers isn't the first holocaust memoir to be exposed as bogus, but it's the first to really rub the reader's face in the assumption that people will believe anything; if there's a more audacious gambit than claiming with a straight face that you were raised by wolves, I'm unaware of it. Yet for more than ten years, someone apparently believed that Defonseca's WWII ordeal wasn't ridiculous garbage. As for Jones, she won't even get the chance to turn her bad luck into a windfall; Penguin has canceled her book tour and recalled every copy of Love and Consequences.
It's right about now that I should probably issue my own confession, namely that I have a vested interested in what becomes of both the publishing industry and the average reader's attitudes toward the memoir genre.
That's because the first two premises I mentioned earlier are stories from my own life; the latter of the two is the basis for the manuscript I'm now shopping to publishers.
When the James Frey controversy exploded, I figured the chances of my selling a memoir having anything at all to do with addiction dropped to zero. Despite this I kept writing, and when I was finished I went back and carefully analyzed what I'd put down on paper -- how I told my story. When it comes to penning a memoir, the traditional defense employed by any writer involves arguing that what's stated isn't so much fact as point-of-view. Although this is certainly true, it provides no license to lie with impunity. You don't get to just make stuff up; there's a word for that: fiction. It's one thing to remember an event differently than others may; it's another thing entirely to create situations, people and places wholesale, then pass it off as personal experience. Controlling the writer's tendency to introduce the "what if?" into a scenario and expand as such is an absolute must.
The truth matters.
But what do you do when the truth really is hard to believe?
In 2001, I lived in West Hollywood with my wife at the time, had a great job, a gorgeous apartment and a nice car. I was also a hardcore heroin addict, a little habit I'd taken up when my marriage began disintegrating. After watching my life spiral into oblivion until it hit the very bottom, I made the decision to leave L.A. and check myself into a public rehab facility in South Florida. I went through a month of hell. During that time, my wife moved out of our apartment, and when I finally left rehab I had nothing. No job, no marriage, no money -- nothing. I flew out to L.A., paid off the loans I'd taken out to buy drugs, packed up my things and drove cross-country with my father -- back to South Florida where I took up residence in my parents' guest bedroom. I was a zombie. Completely numb. No future, no hope. On September 11th, 2001, I watched the planes hit the towers and realized that the fact that I had nothing meant I had nothing holding me back. I drove to New York City with the intention of doing something, anything to help. I got a job as a freelancer for MSNBC and lived in a hotel for five months. I rebuilt my life one day at a time: a new person in a new place in a world gone mad. The pain of others put my own into perspective.
Looking back at that time -- even while writing about it -- I'm neither proud nor ashamed of what happened to me and what I did to (and for) myself and others. It's just a story at this point. But it is a true story, to the best of my memory. I've done all I can to remember events and conversations as they happened and I in no way attampt to make myself appear heroic or noble. I'm definitely not the good guy.
Still, if I were a reader I'm not sure I'd buy it.
Even I think the whole thing sounds too farfetched.
Back in my teen years, when I didn't consider myself a writer, I came across an article by Joel Achenbach of the Miami Herald (now of the Washington Post) describing something he termed "Creeping Surrealism." According to Achenbach, it's the nagging feeling that nothing is real anymore; fakery has become so virtuoso that authenticity itself can be legitimately called into question, and most people who can tell the difference between real and bullshit no longer think the distinction matters.
I'd like nothing more than to convince you otherwise.
But why should you believe anything I have to say?
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