Read a little more about James Frey’s fictional memoir. Now, I’m a big fan of fiction, and I’m a big fan of memoir, but never the twain should meet or mingle. If Frey-scale liberties are taken in a memoir, it should be marketed as fiction and not claim any more or less. I want to be very careful not to imply that fiction isn’t true. Fiction contains and conveys truth—a special kind of truth that only fiction can carry; that’s fiction’s job, at least the kind of fiction that I’m biased towards, which can be crudely classified as “literary fiction” to distinguish it from writing tooled and bored-out as a get-away car. Fiction which robes itself in the formal constructs of memoir is still fiction, and there’s nothing wrong with that kind of borrowing and appropriation as long the work doesn’t also decptively coax the reader into accepting a non-fiction contract it cannot uphold. Literature is bankrupt when writers willingly default on the trust readers loan them. Masquerade balls are all about complicit illusion catalyzing social revelation; they have never been meant to convince anybody that the costume-wearer is truly something or someone other than who she really is, and fiction functions similarly; its creativity seeks to deliver a clarifying echo of reality—a delightful reverberation bouncing back off the cavern wall, not the hissing tape recording of an answering machine. Through fiction’s configuration of hypothetical details it builds an abstracted platonic form that cradles a truth theorum (heh, where and why do I get off writing crap like that?). Thus fiction exists in the service of truth without claiming to be the truth. Memoir, on the other hand, gathers much of its power by saying to its audience, “This really happened.” Frey’s and his publisher’s posturing A Million Little Pieces as unadorned reportage along with the author’s repeated claims of no-bullshit transparency was a dishonesty that has squandered a bucketful of public trust in the form and its peddlers. I’m angry about that. Except in regards to sincerity, my own project is so similar—unnervingly so when I discovered that he, too, rejects most of the twelve-step rigmarole—that Frey has effectively cried wolf before I could sound the saving alarm. That upsets, but does not deter, me.

Big Jimmyboy was certainly industrious with his shame; let me offer an example of how he might have done it without adding further shame: at personalfiction.com I have begun to electronisize (heh, where and why do I get off writing crap like that?) a project in which I have recognized certain badboy impulses in myself and others with regards to women and then exaggerated and embellished them (perhaps not as expertly as Mr. Frey does) and cataloged them into a piece of fiction. I’ve borrowed from my life (as did Frey) and I want to tell the truth (as claimed Frey) but the character outlined in “Personal” is not me (thank goodness). Keep in mind that right now, it’s a work-in-progress that exists mostly in my notebooks, but will continue to be keyed in as time allows.