Monday, December 29, 2008

More Crap


Yet another memoir has been proven to be a heaping pile of crap. This time it is about a couple meeting in a Nazi concentration camp. This is just one more in a long line of people making up stories, becoming famous for the lives they didn't live, then (suprise! suprise!) turn out to have made the whole thing up. About a year ago another such book was about to come out about a woman who grew up on the streets selling drugs of mixed spanish/indian heritage. There was one problem, she was a white girl from a rich suburb. And few people remember the story of JT Leroy who wrote a novel about being a young male prostitute at a truck stop. The problem, it was written by a woman who never lived such a life. And would it be any real shock that Oprah supported this book? Nope, she does have a habit of shouting hooray for someone without knowing where they come from. Seriously, how does she have any credibility left?

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posted by Out Of Jersey | 5:47 AM

5 Comments:

Blogger Art said...

Have I ever told you about my exeriences as a ground-pounder in Viet Nam? They're quite interesting:)

12:25 AM  
Blogger Out Of Jersey said...

I always knew you had a secret life art.

5:04 AM  
Blogger jasdye said...

art,

and you would've been, what, eight?

dave,

if they're going to say that fiction can be true or that it was meta-true or whatever the heck: fine. then mark it as truth-ful fiction. or better yet, say that the events did not happen as they appear. but they market it as having actually occurred and that fools people into buying (in both senses of the word) your story.

whereas if it were labeled as fiction in the first place, the storyteller would have to work harder to get that kind of rapt attention.

of course i'm preaching to the choir on this one, but still... whatever happened to fact-checkers, editors and maybe some sense of decency in the publishing world?

9:42 PM  
Blogger Out Of Jersey said...

Seriously man, I totally agree with you. I have a feeling these books would have been fantastic in their own rights as fiction. I heard Frye even tried to sell it as a novel at first. Perhaps the stories need a bit of truth to them or something. I don't know. I remember reading Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms and getting into a discussion as to whether it was based off his life or not.

3:19 PM  
Blogger jasdye said...

just read an interview w/ sedaris yesterday. he said, "memoirs are the LAST place you look to for truth."

1:24 PM  

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