Consequences indeed

Submitted by Gina de Villiers

Last week, the mixed-race Margaret B Jones, who was raised in poverty and suffered an abusive childhood while running drugs for local gangs to survive, confessed to being white, to attending a private school and to enjoying a privileged upbringing in a suburb far from her fictitious home. As a result, her memoir of “hope and survival”, entitled Love and Consequences, is being recalled and her book tour cancelled.

One cannot blame publishing house Riverhead for being a little peeved. After all, it nearly signed a two-book, seven-figure deal with James Frey two years ago — he of A Million Little Pieces and scamming Oprah’s book club.

Ironically, yet another memoir was unveiled as fiction just the week before. Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years was published 10 years ago and has been questioned by historians and literary scholars for some time. It has still sold thousands of copies and inspired a movie.

In all three cases, the discussions surrounding the scandals have been similar: Why have publishers not verified facts? Why have the authors lied? Why is fiction branded and sold as fact? What exactly is a memoir?

James Frey and Misha Defonseca have both said that telling their lies was part of their coping mechanisms, or an expression of their own truth. Margaret Jones thought she had an “opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have”.

I’m not convinced that one’s own truth constitutes a memoir, though. Allowing for necessary reconstruction of long-past conversations, altering names for privacy’s sake, perhaps even setting a story in another location — this is all done, often, and I’m comfortable with that. However, these changes do not necessarily change the spirit of the base story, which, arguably, the wholesale fact manufacture witnessed in the three novels mentioned does.

And the spirit of their stories is very, very important, given that there are real stories of miraculous drug recovery, Holocaust survival and defeating the odds. There are numerous such stories, real stories belonging to real people, and I’m wondering whether pretending that one shares in that reality is not an ultimate disrespect. Frey in particular does not seem to feel that his fiction should detract from the inspiration his novel offers to sufferers and families of sufferers. I disagree. I personally read autobiographies because I am fascinated by the writer’s life, and by what he or she achieved or lived through. It is the reality that is inspiring. How can an only-partially-true reality offer the same? I read Tolkien to be moved by the heights of an author’s imagination.

Frey’s book earned millions following Oprah’s endorsement. Defonseca probably netted a penny or two selling her movie rights. Jones would have made money, had her deception not been discovered when it was. The authentic earnings from these unauthentic stories bothers me as well, personally and on behalf of the authors worldwide who write away for decades before they are recognised. Whether the publishing houses in each case were genuinely duped or whether this is all a clever marketing scheme, branding a book as a memoir when it is not is just not honest, it is false advertising.

Perhaps “memoir” is a term being bandied just a little too often. There is surely nothing wrong with a novel being “based on” the life of someone else, or on one’s own life — Hollywood does it all the time. But there is a subtle difference between that and a memoir, isn’t there?

Gina de Villiers works in communications in Johannesburg. As a prolific reader, she feels she deserves an opinion regarding what she reads. She now writes occasionally too — read her blog Musings and Daydreams