Just check the map, already
The literary blogosophere is humming in the wake of the latest scandal surrounding a fake memoir, the middle-class, all-white, privately educated Margaret Seltzer's exploitation of violence, poverty, sexual abuse, and African American and Native American suffering, identity, and culture for her own ends.
And because of all that I'm reading on the topic, I need to disagree with one point in Mark Doty's "Bride in Beige: A Poet's Approach to Memoir" in the latest issue of Poets & Writers. A long-time admirer of Doty’s poetry and prose, I agree with and relish several of the points he makes, but I found myself drawn up short by this assertion regarding his book Firebird, a memoir I have happily taught:
But that's a slippery slope, isn't it? What about a memoirist, like Seltzer, whose subjectivity apparently includes a very high comfort level with deception and appropriation? Or what about a memoirist whose subjectivity includes fantasies of having been a Jewish Holocaust survivor raised by wolves, as was the case with Misha Defonseca, who recently said,
Doty gives his own minor example of an overly creative memory:
So it was important to me, as my book went to press, that everything be strictly verifiable. Though my book claims to be my story and my story alone, I understood that it might also be read as a social document, the way Ishmael Beah's story has been read as one way of gaining insight into the terrible, traumatized world of child soldiers.
Because I knew it would be read that way--and for the sake of other children suffering from abuse or religious manipulation--I wanted my book to stand not only as art but also as a reliable social document, which meant it had to be factual, corroborated, at every possible point. To accomplish this—to include not only my own personal, subjective memories of events but also every feasible good-faith effort to verify them—I relied on maps, photo albums, a baby book in my mother’s hand, religious literature, files of legal documents, newspaper accounts, and, finally, my adult brother's corroboration and approval of what I'd written. (So there was no sibling to come forward and reveal deception, as was the case with Seltzer.)
When an adapted excerpt from The Truth Book was to run as the "Lives" column in the New York Times Magazine, the Times, burned by its own scandals, required me to FedEx a huge file of photocopied documents (including my parents' divorce decree from the 1970s) to verify every claim or allusion in the piece. Their fact-checkers also called the relatives mentioned in the piece, in order to confirm the story. They vetted everything. Why can't publishing houses make a similar good-faith effort?
Doty’s essay continues:
Because we can all write dreamy, unverified reminiscences, and we can publish them, too. There's a whole category for them; it's called autobiographical fiction, and its practitioners are legion and canonically esteemed. But the bottom line is that, today, if your book is pitched as fiction or poetry, it won't sell as well in our current reality-TV publishing market. And money seems to have an awful lot to do with the most egregious scandals. A whole lot of dollars have been changing hands for these non-memoirs and inaccurate memoirs. Over a million for James Frey's Oprah-endorsed book, if I’m remembering correctly; about a million for Ishmael Beah's; something close to but "less than $100,000" for Seltzer's. Misha Defonseca stood to gain an additional $22.5 million, had her fraud not been exposed.
So enough with the rationalizations, already.
"I just felt that there was good that I could do," said Margaret Seltzer in an interview after the story broke. Oh, really?
And because of all that I'm reading on the topic, I need to disagree with one point in Mark Doty's "Bride in Beige: A Poet's Approach to Memoir" in the latest issue of Poets & Writers. A long-time admirer of Doty’s poetry and prose, I agree with and relish several of the points he makes, but I found myself drawn up short by this assertion regarding his book Firebird, a memoir I have happily taught:
. . . [S]ome memoirs are much more interested in the process and character of remembering than others; in these, it sometimes feels that memory itself is a form: associative, elusive, metaphoric, metonymic. Memory arranges sequences, heightens moments, makes the duration of some events vast or twinklingly brief, changes the colors or soundtrack or lighting of a scene in order to heighten emotion.In other words, memory is an artist. It fabricates. It exaggerates. Memory imagines—sometimes gorgeously—and memory lies. I agree. But "some memoirs," Doty claims nonjudgmentally, are simply "more interested" in those airy mental moves than in the facts that ground them. He sees his own book as "allegiant to memory, not to history." The key, for Doty, is capturing "the texture of subjectivity."
But that's a slippery slope, isn't it? What about a memoirist, like Seltzer, whose subjectivity apparently includes a very high comfort level with deception and appropriation? Or what about a memoirist whose subjectivity includes fantasies of having been a Jewish Holocaust survivor raised by wolves, as was the case with Misha Defonseca, who recently said,
The book is a story, it's my story. . . . It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world.Or what about even a well-meaning (I believe) memoirist like Ishmael Beah, whose subjective, traumatized, uncorroborated memory apparently took the liberty of expanding his time as a child soldier from months (at the age of fifteen) into years (beginning at age thirteen)?
Doty gives his own minor example of an overly creative memory:
In Firebird, I claim, for instance, that we lived . . . on Ramses Street. It wasn't until I went back to Memphis after the book was published that I learned there was no such place. But the town was named for an Egyptian city, and I'd been fascinated by mummies in a museum, and our front porch had fat, tapered columns just like the ones in the pictures of Luxor in my book of archaeology—so you can see how I got there. Had I known that I was inventing this, I would have made that invention a part of my text, since the process of misremembering is itself revealing. But I never looked at a map to try to confirm my memory, though I know there are memoirists who would.Myself, I'm one of those pesky, pedestrian "memoirists who would." I'm not sure what drove Doty to write Firebird, but in writing my own memoir, I had a lot at stake. As a child, I had been accused of lying when I reported molestation, so I was already hesitant to speak out. Moreover, my book reveals the inner workings of a little-understood religious sect and the private pathologies of an abusive home; I knew that some readers could be skeptical of and perhaps even hostile to those revelations.
So it was important to me, as my book went to press, that everything be strictly verifiable. Though my book claims to be my story and my story alone, I understood that it might also be read as a social document, the way Ishmael Beah's story has been read as one way of gaining insight into the terrible, traumatized world of child soldiers.
Because I knew it would be read that way--and for the sake of other children suffering from abuse or religious manipulation--I wanted my book to stand not only as art but also as a reliable social document, which meant it had to be factual, corroborated, at every possible point. To accomplish this—to include not only my own personal, subjective memories of events but also every feasible good-faith effort to verify them—I relied on maps, photo albums, a baby book in my mother’s hand, religious literature, files of legal documents, newspaper accounts, and, finally, my adult brother's corroboration and approval of what I'd written. (So there was no sibling to come forward and reveal deception, as was the case with Seltzer.)
When an adapted excerpt from The Truth Book was to run as the "Lives" column in the New York Times Magazine, the Times, burned by its own scandals, required me to FedEx a huge file of photocopied documents (including my parents' divorce decree from the 1970s) to verify every claim or allusion in the piece. Their fact-checkers also called the relatives mentioned in the piece, in order to confirm the story. They vetted everything. Why can't publishing houses make a similar good-faith effort?
Doty’s essay continues:
My interest was in how it felt to be that boy, in the world as he understood it, and that world is a construction, a set of associations tinged by obsessions and fascinations, a landscape as interior as it is external. It is, in other words, a poem.Ah, a poem. Sorry to be pedestrian and literal in my capitulation to generic categories imposed by publishers, but the back cover of my copy of Firebird says "BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY," not "POETRY." Maybe that's the space Doty's carving out for his practice of memoir here, and we can agree to disagree. But I have to wonder, too, about the bottom line.
Because we can all write dreamy, unverified reminiscences, and we can publish them, too. There's a whole category for them; it's called autobiographical fiction, and its practitioners are legion and canonically esteemed. But the bottom line is that, today, if your book is pitched as fiction or poetry, it won't sell as well in our current reality-TV publishing market. And money seems to have an awful lot to do with the most egregious scandals. A whole lot of dollars have been changing hands for these non-memoirs and inaccurate memoirs. Over a million for James Frey's Oprah-endorsed book, if I’m remembering correctly; about a million for Ishmael Beah's; something close to but "less than $100,000" for Seltzer's. Misha Defonseca stood to gain an additional $22.5 million, had her fraud not been exposed.
So enough with the rationalizations, already.
"I just felt that there was good that I could do," said Margaret Seltzer in an interview after the story broke. Oh, really?
By appropriating, commodifying, and fictionalizing the painful losses and traumas of others? By writing them all up in a Starbucks and getting an advance of close to $100K? I'd be very interested to know how much of her check she shared with her "close friends." Seltzer was a girl with every material advantage who grew up to commodify and exploit the suffering of others and pass it off as her own, for her own financial benefit.
Seltzer’s editor, Sarah McGrath at Riverhead, claimed, "She seems to be very, very naïve." Oh, on the contrary. From this distance, Seltzer's actions seem the precise opposite of naïve. They seem driven by greed and frighteningly savvy about a corrupt system so uninformed about and hungry for titillating stories of the racialized, classed, traumatized Other that it will accept unverified, clichéd, suspicious narratives.
But back to Mark Doty. Like Doty's, my interest in writing my own memoir was also "in how it felt to be that [girl]," my own particular self swimming in those events, the strangeness of my subjective experience. Yet it was, I knew, a subjective experience that had unfolded inside a larger world, a historical world, a world that could be corroborated, verified.
By titling my book The Truth Book, by publishing it as memoir, I was staking a certain kind of claim. I wrote it not for money, not for fame and attention, and not for a sorry "House & Home" piece in the New York Times. I wrote it to answer urgent questions in my own life and to bear witness.
Maybe that's the difference.
Unlike these writers, I didn't seek, in my twenties, to capitalize on the misery I’d survived (or the misery of folks I’d met, or read about) as a quick path to fame and fortune. Honestly, I was too damaged, and too busy trying to make a life.
By the time I wrote The Truth Book, I was a professor, a mother, and a publishing author with a decent life I liked. I wrote my book carefully and honestly. It didn't pander to stereotypes about Latinos, religious zealots, or the poor, and it didn’t deliver tasty clichés. It didn't provide an easily consumable commodity that confirmed people's ready-made assumptions about the various groups involved.
On the other hand--and here's that bottom-line thing again--my book was not an Oprah book, not a Starbucks book, not a book whose reception was buoyed up by the guarantee of pieces in various high-profile magazines and newspapers because of my editor's web of connections. When The Truth Book appeared, there was no vast machinery poised to propel it into national visibility. Though I received an advance in the unglamorous four figures from a small, independent house, I felt proud and grateful; I knew they were doing their absolute best by the book and by me.
Because of its fidelity not only to fact but also to the processes of memory—those “associative, elusive, metaphoric, metonymic” aspects Doty lauds—The Truth Book was not written to be ready-made for mass consumption. In fact, an editor (at one of the publishers connected to these recent scandals, btw) rejected it by saying that my book’s structure was too experimental, too Virginia Woolf, and he needed books that wouldn't confuse "the little old lady in Iowa with her glasses on upside down." (I was sad about this, and thought perhaps he underrated the perspicacity of elderly Iowan women. Indeed, one of my greatest satisfactions has been the—unaltered—Truth Book’s success in Midwestern women’s book clubs.)
But this kind of editorial condescension—which leads to a readiness to purvey familiar, pre-digested horror stories draped with the false claim of real-life veracity to an audience deemed incapable of comprehending (much less enjoying) anything more complicated—is just another sad fact of the cynical side of publishing.
Mine was just a modest little book, deeply personal yet also scrupulously factual, one person's verifiable truth. And memoir, I believe, should be just that: one person's and verifiable.
But of course we are all human. We are fallible, and there is such a thing as a good-faith mistake. Not with James Frey or Tim Barrus, a.k.a. Nasdijj, another white rip-off artist, and not with Seltzer or Defonseca. But perhaps you could say that's what happened with Mark Doty and his fabricated Ramses Street (though I would still, in his shoes, have checked a map). And perhaps that is what’s happening with Ishmael Beah's book now. If someone has been unable to access the archives that would verify what one can remember, it's understandable that errors could creep into even a well-intentioned narrative.
But the best thing to do when we make good-faith mistakes, generally, is to acknowledge them, apologize, make repairs, and figure out how not to make them again. Not wave off the evidence, as Beah has. And not embrace inaccuracies in the name of capturing the "texture of subjectivity," because some folks' subjectivities, clearly, leave them a whole lot of wiggle room when it comes to the truth. Far better to do as Doty says he might have done: "Had I known that I was inventing this, I would have made that invention a part of my text, since the process of misremembering is itself revealing." And how much more fascinating. How much more interesting it was to watch him reconstruct, sympathetically and imaginatively, his boyhood process of conjuring up "Ramses" than to read the inaccurate street name, however evocative, in the book.
So, memoirists, check your facts. Look at the map. And above all, don’t rip off the real suffering of others to enhance your own sense of worth in the world. Real people suffer from racism and poverty. Real people were actually sexually abused, and real people went through the foster system. To appropriate their stories is to abuse them all over again. No advance is worth your integrity.
In "The Art of Creative Research," which I recommend to anyone writing or teaching memoir, Philip Gerard makes these thoughtful points, so salient to this topic:
With many thanks to Tayari Jones, whose blog is tearing it up on this issue.
Seltzer’s editor, Sarah McGrath at Riverhead, claimed, "She seems to be very, very naïve." Oh, on the contrary. From this distance, Seltzer's actions seem the precise opposite of naïve. They seem driven by greed and frighteningly savvy about a corrupt system so uninformed about and hungry for titillating stories of the racialized, classed, traumatized Other that it will accept unverified, clichéd, suspicious narratives.
But back to Mark Doty. Like Doty's, my interest in writing my own memoir was also "in how it felt to be that [girl]," my own particular self swimming in those events, the strangeness of my subjective experience. Yet it was, I knew, a subjective experience that had unfolded inside a larger world, a historical world, a world that could be corroborated, verified.
By titling my book The Truth Book, by publishing it as memoir, I was staking a certain kind of claim. I wrote it not for money, not for fame and attention, and not for a sorry "House & Home" piece in the New York Times. I wrote it to answer urgent questions in my own life and to bear witness.
Maybe that's the difference.
Unlike these writers, I didn't seek, in my twenties, to capitalize on the misery I’d survived (or the misery of folks I’d met, or read about) as a quick path to fame and fortune. Honestly, I was too damaged, and too busy trying to make a life.
By the time I wrote The Truth Book, I was a professor, a mother, and a publishing author with a decent life I liked. I wrote my book carefully and honestly. It didn't pander to stereotypes about Latinos, religious zealots, or the poor, and it didn’t deliver tasty clichés. It didn't provide an easily consumable commodity that confirmed people's ready-made assumptions about the various groups involved.
On the other hand--and here's that bottom-line thing again--my book was not an Oprah book, not a Starbucks book, not a book whose reception was buoyed up by the guarantee of pieces in various high-profile magazines and newspapers because of my editor's web of connections. When The Truth Book appeared, there was no vast machinery poised to propel it into national visibility. Though I received an advance in the unglamorous four figures from a small, independent house, I felt proud and grateful; I knew they were doing their absolute best by the book and by me.
Because of its fidelity not only to fact but also to the processes of memory—those “associative, elusive, metaphoric, metonymic” aspects Doty lauds—The Truth Book was not written to be ready-made for mass consumption. In fact, an editor (at one of the publishers connected to these recent scandals, btw) rejected it by saying that my book’s structure was too experimental, too Virginia Woolf, and he needed books that wouldn't confuse "the little old lady in Iowa with her glasses on upside down." (I was sad about this, and thought perhaps he underrated the perspicacity of elderly Iowan women. Indeed, one of my greatest satisfactions has been the—unaltered—Truth Book’s success in Midwestern women’s book clubs.)
But this kind of editorial condescension—which leads to a readiness to purvey familiar, pre-digested horror stories draped with the false claim of real-life veracity to an audience deemed incapable of comprehending (much less enjoying) anything more complicated—is just another sad fact of the cynical side of publishing.
Mine was just a modest little book, deeply personal yet also scrupulously factual, one person's verifiable truth. And memoir, I believe, should be just that: one person's and verifiable.
But of course we are all human. We are fallible, and there is such a thing as a good-faith mistake. Not with James Frey or Tim Barrus, a.k.a. Nasdijj, another white rip-off artist, and not with Seltzer or Defonseca. But perhaps you could say that's what happened with Mark Doty and his fabricated Ramses Street (though I would still, in his shoes, have checked a map). And perhaps that is what’s happening with Ishmael Beah's book now. If someone has been unable to access the archives that would verify what one can remember, it's understandable that errors could creep into even a well-intentioned narrative.
But the best thing to do when we make good-faith mistakes, generally, is to acknowledge them, apologize, make repairs, and figure out how not to make them again. Not wave off the evidence, as Beah has. And not embrace inaccuracies in the name of capturing the "texture of subjectivity," because some folks' subjectivities, clearly, leave them a whole lot of wiggle room when it comes to the truth. Far better to do as Doty says he might have done: "Had I known that I was inventing this, I would have made that invention a part of my text, since the process of misremembering is itself revealing." And how much more fascinating. How much more interesting it was to watch him reconstruct, sympathetically and imaginatively, his boyhood process of conjuring up "Ramses" than to read the inaccurate street name, however evocative, in the book.
So, memoirists, check your facts. Look at the map. And above all, don’t rip off the real suffering of others to enhance your own sense of worth in the world. Real people suffer from racism and poverty. Real people were actually sexually abused, and real people went through the foster system. To appropriate their stories is to abuse them all over again. No advance is worth your integrity.
In "The Art of Creative Research," which I recommend to anyone writing or teaching memoir, Philip Gerard makes these thoughtful points, so salient to this topic:
In an important way, almost all memoir derives from accidental research—surely most children don't create and preserve a deliberate archive of their life experiences to draw upon later when they decide to take up the literary life. They did not choose to do an immersion project as the abused child in a dangerous home, or volunteer to be raped, or deliberately participate in the Holocaust. They rely on the memory of experiences that happened to them—an episodic, fragmented, skewed, kaleidoscope of moments filtered through attitude and emotion.A very good argument, indeed.
Yet for the writer, everything is a lesson.
I say "in an important sense" because it calls to our attention just how provisional the evidence is upon which so much memoir is based. If someone had indeed been taking notes or videotaping the experience, would that truth corroborate remembered truth, even in a broad way? Of course not, or at least, not often, which makes an argument for researching your own life—ransacking the archives of home movies, photographs, public records, and the reminiscences of others who were there, to enlarge and complexify the narrative about yourself you have rehearsed for so long.
With many thanks to Tayari Jones, whose blog is tearing it up on this issue.
Laban
said:
When I worked at several NY publishing houses more than a decade ago, I was also stunned by the fact that cookbook editors did not check all the recipes to make sure they worked. When I worked for a how-to publisher, I was always stunned by how many letters the publisher would receive about the instructions for the woodworking projects in a book having critical mistakes. Publishers have never fact checked. It is definitely a buyer beware industry.
March 7, 2008 2:20 PM