Lying Liars and the Readers Who Love Them

Since this is a rant about honesty in print, let me just give a full disclosure here: I'm writing this with a sinus infection, and many of you may have sad firsthand knowledge of how one of those will quite literally mess with your head. I'm a few days away from having some surgery that I hope will make sinus infections a thing of the past so far as I'm concerned. I want to finish this piece and get it posted quickly because in the soon-to-come days after I allow some near-stranger to rummage around in my cranium, I don't intend to feel well enough to do anything more strenuous than choose which rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to fall asleep to.

I'm already feeling a great deal less energetic than I generally do when working on a piece. However, as I intend this writing to demonstrate, I am deeply, passionately, tongue-kissingly attached to accuracy in print. So if I point out that something happened or somebody did something, it is to the best of my knowledge true.

I'm not making any claims to originality when I say that I'm going to talk about -- okay, you know what? I'm not saying who, or what he wrote. I don't want to have to link to his book. I hate him. He's a jerk on toast. But unless you only turn on the television to watch the weather channel, and only buy the paper for the Sudoku puzzle, you know who I'm talking about. The guy whose "memoirs" aren't. The guy who has backing from a woman that a lot of people pay a lot of attention to when they're in the bookstore trying to decide what to buy. The guy who brought his mom on the Larry King show. If you still don't know, ask your mom, okay? Ever since you grew up and moved out and stopped paying any attention to the woman who gave you life, she's had a lot of spare time to read up on scandals like this one. I'm sure the woman who wasted the best years of her life trying to understand your math homework assignments would be delighted to have you back demanding that she explain something to you.

Anyway. I don't watch TV and I only buy the paper for the advice columns ("Dear Amy: My husband says that the woman he spends the night with three times a week is 'just a good friend'"), so I wouldn't have known anything about the book in question and the lying bastard who wrote it if my husband hadn't unearthed some of the eviller details in his unending quest for weirdness in the news. If memory serves, there was something about a parking violation being blown up by the author into hard prison time. I remember rolling my eyes and wondering what kind of world it was where a guy is so eaten up with regret at not being sent to prison that he can't bear to admit it in print. My thoughts were unusually succinct and basically ran along the lines of "What a loser."

I thought that would be the last I'd hear about it. My husband had moved on to greener weird-news pastures (Japanese fishermen troubled by sea jellies the size of Sumo wrestlers, to be exact), and I was busy trying to figure out how to wangle the precedent set by various rulings in favor of medical marijuana usage into morphine on demand for sinus infection sufferers. But I just couldn't get away from this guy's stupid story. There was a long, loooong article about it in my newspaper (fine, it was the L.A. Times), and they had the nerve to put it in the same section as the comics page so I couldn't possibly miss it. And as I was catching up on loading the special little bin we keep for recyclables (I love recycling, because it lets me have two trash cans so I can take the trash out half as often, and yes I did that math all by myself), I caught a glimpse of another article about the jerk-faced fact-mauler. Like an idiot, I read the thing. It was only a fourth of a page, but it was enough. I wasn't going to be able to sleep without doing some serious ranting.

This jeremiad isn't about the idiot and his dorky book. (No, I haven't read it. So? I can still trash talk it. As Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers put it after expressing his deep dislike of a particular musical, "I'm an American! I don't have to see something to know I don't like it!") This also isn't (to my husband's great and frequently mentioned disappointment -- honey, I love you; now please shut up and let me type) about a woman whose initials are O and some other letter and why she's either stupid or possessed of questionable morality for insisting that an autobiography doesn't have to sweat whether or not it's actually factually true as long as it resonates for her. This is about -- for real and seriously, now -- truth and writing. The nature of biography. Why it matters when someone writes his "life story" and it turns out to be a novel he couldn't sell until he called it nonfiction instead and hey, presto! it went bestseller. That it matters when someone lies when he says he's telling the truth.

Joel Stein, the quarter-page columnist mentioned above, is playing it pretty cool about the whole thing. He read the book and says he doesn't like it any less now that he knows it's "built on a lie." He compares that to Hamlet being a good play no matter who actually wrote it. (I don't know if he's making a glancing reference to a book that recently came out claiming that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, the guy who financed Shakespeare's sonnets. I do know that I'm not linking to that book, either, because I hate anyone and everyone who says that anyone but Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I make a slight exception for Mark Twain in this respect. I do hate him for writing "Is Shakespeare Dead?", but only when I'm actually reading it, which it turns out is a vanishingly small percentage of the time.)

I realize that this is showing my true colors as a total ingrate, since I laughed my adorable little heinie off at Stein's last column and never breathed a word about it, and now here I am about to chew him out publicly when he slips up in print. I'm sure he's trembling at the thought of all 27 of my readers frowning disapprovingly in his general direction. But he knew the job was dangerous when he took it. Journalism is like working retail. Clerking in a bookstore, say. You never hear a word when you do everything right, but drop just one little OED on one customer's foot and see if you ever hear the end of it. Not that I'd know anything about that.

But I digress. Again. The fact is, Stein himself admits that he wouldn't have bought the book in question if he'd known beforehand that the author was "just a suburban kid trying to look tough."

He should have stuck with that. Instead, he said that learning that the book was a hoax doesn't make him like it any less. He then went on about how a book is "a work that exists in and of itself, apart from the author's intent, even apart from the author's identity." (That's where he worked the Hamlet reference in.)

Let's tackle everything those two statements really mean, shall we? Oh, come on. It'll be fun.

The long-booty article I mentioned before dispassionately quoted several people who basically said pretty much what Stein did -- that if the book is an enjoyable read, that's what matters about it, not that pesky little detail about whether or not what someone claims as factual is actually (oh, that old-fashioned, boring little word -- do we have to even go there?) true. They got all profound about it. After all, there is no objective truth, they pointed out for the benefit of the little people out there who still believe in such a nineteenth- (or possibly ninth-) century concept. Everything is subjective.

Well, I guess if you're a lazy-ass moral inept who gets paid and/or famous and/or off by spouting stupid generalizations that sound great until you actually break them down, that might be the case. But if you're a human being living and breathing on this planet, it turns out there's plenty of objective truth. It's just that most of it is so boring that no one in their right minds would waste any memory cells on it if they didn't have to.

Here's some of the boring objective stuff, for what it's worth (basically nothing, and that's my point): I got up this morning later than I usually do, because I felt like (insert your favorite expletive here, and please make sure it's a noun or this sentence won't make any sense). I had some cantaloupe with breakfast; my son preferred his vitamin C in the form of Wild Oats-brand orange juice (pulp-free). We also had cold cereal, in spite of my vow to cook a hot breakfast every morning this week to make up for the nutritional funk my son will undoubtedly fall into during my anticipated post-surgical state of indifferent ickiness.

That's just true, okay? One hundred percent objectively so. The clock was there, my kid was there, the cereal and the fruit and the juice were all there. You weren't there, for which we may all be appropriately thankful since that would be rather odd; but I'm pretty sure, unless you're a pathological liar and therefore believe that everyone else must be one too, that you're willing to take my word for it that the morning I've described really happened. It's just too boring not to be true, frankly. So who cares?

Nobody, right now. But I'll bet somebody would if I keeled over right after breakfast from strychnine poisoning. All of a sudden, exactly what I ate, and where and why and who else happened to be in the room, would be very important. And very interesting -- even to strangers, if they heard about it. Which these days they probably would. My son's only seven, so I doubt he'd get much heat, but my husband would be under some intense scrutiny. He'd have to cough up a lot of ordinarily dull objective details about what he'd been up to, and what he hadn't been up to, and with whom, and when.

Well, of course. If a crime's been committed, all of a sudden all those moral relativists crawl right back into their holes.

But a book is different, right? Even a fraudulent one. Nobody died, or even was made sick -- except me, and even I'll admit that's a purely metaphorical use of the word. So what's the big deal?

Especially when we're talking about a book that people felt moved and educated by, that brought up issues people ought to be discussing, that had an important message to impart.

Does anyone remember the fairly recent case of the woman -- I believe she was a university professor in California -- who, while giving a talk about tolerance and how terrible it is that people still let issues of race and religion divide them, had her car vandalized? Painted with hate language, just when she was speaking against exactly such words? Wasn't that awful?

It sure was. Especially when it came out that apparently she'd done the deed herself.

I don't remember hearing one word about there being no such thing as objective truth in this case. And I certainly don't remember seeing any letters to the editor (as I did regarding the book in question) about how it didn't really matter if the woman's car was vandalized or not, since the message she was trying to send through her work and her speaking and even her (alleged, don't even think about suing me, I'm already broke and you'll just look like a jerk) self-inflicted car-slurs.

Why not? Why is this any different from the autobiographical liar?

It isn't. There's no difference at all. Not morally, not ethically, not even all that physically since we're talking about two separate people who decided to lie in print. Granted, one of them was using spray paint, but still. Pants-on-fire best-seller book boy isn't a case of someone penning his memoirs and groping around in his admittedly faulty memory for what happened in the early autumn of 1987 and accidentally telling about something that really occurred in the late summer of 1986. This is someone who deliberately falsified the events of his own life, and did everything he could to shut any doors and windows that might lead to the truth of what happened, to make himself look better. Or worse, in this case. Because that's what would sell. I mean, spread his message of emotional truth and resonance to a wider audience.

I find it morbidly humorous that this particular best-seller bears a through-the-looking-glass resemblance to another one that came out around a century ago. What's-his-name apparently tried to sell his story as a novel, and couldn't get any takers. Betty Smith tried to sell her life-story as an autobiography and was advised to rewrite it as a novel. She did, and now we have the luminous treasure that is A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.

Knowing that Smith based the story on her life, I have some natural curiosity as to how much of it was actually true. It doesn't keep me up at night, but if anyone has the dirt on Betty Smith, I wouldn't mind hearing it. But I don't mind not knowing, because the story she wrote is so good that I'm also perfectly happy just having that. But only because she already told me it's just a story. I don't really need to know the "truth" to judge how good her novel is, the way I'd need to know a lot more than I do about (for instance) Nixon's real life and career in order to be able to judge the movie Nixon purely as a work of art. (And let's not even talk about Oliver Stone's J.F.K.)

Getting back to Joel Stein's column, which I'm using as a loose base for this piece partly because it's short and I happened to hang onto it and partly because what he says is pretty representative of what I read in the rest of the paper -- the longer piece they ran and the letters to the editor and all that -- which in turn seems fairly representative of the prevailing attitude regarding this book. Stein says flat-out that he wouldn't have bought the guy's book if he'd known the truth about this particular liar. He's admitting that he spent money he wouldn't have, not to mention the time and energy reading this work entailed. And he's not the only one. I will guarantee you right now that every single person who purchased the book in question before the truth came out bought it because they believed that the material contained therein was, to the best of the writer's knowledge, factually true. They wouldn't have looked twice at it if it were on the fiction shelf at the bookstore (unless of course the mighty O was still putting her recommend on contemporary novels). The bizarre nosiness that overtakes the best of us at times when it comes to reading about total strangers bears no resemblance to the dreamy meandering we do when surrounded by novels. There's no way that someone was standing there with, say, Alison Lurie's latest fictional offering (which I intend to purchase for my hospital stay) in one hand and this "memoir" in the other, pondering which one they'd prefer to buy. The people who purchased this book were in a voyeuristic mood and wanted a "real" story. They wanted to buy something that gave them the opportunity to feel good about wanting the intimate details about some total stranger's life, so they chose a "life story" that had, they were told on what they considered good authority, a message of hope and inspiration.

(That sounded a little judgmental. Heck, snooty. I do read biographies. I admit I don't usually read them if the person in question is still alive. I think alive people are boring. I also think that autobiographies are iffy at best, so far as getting all possible angles about what "really" happened, and prefer it if the person who penned his or her life story has been dead long enough for someone else to have written a reputable, researched, documented, paper-trail and interview-intensive work of biography, just to balance things out. A while back, I read some of Colette's "autobiographical" work -- gorgeous writing, as hers always is -- and then read the good recent biographies that explain what a lying slut Colette was. That's my idea of a good time. Sorry to digress, but I just thought you should know.)

So getting back to Sir Lies-a-lot. Why does this guy have so many people apologizing for him? Why are people who don't have to -- people who aren't his mom or his dog or his long-lost identical twin brother -- saying that his lying is okay, or at least okay with them? Why are the people he swindled not re-enacting the village mob scene from Young Frankenstein, complete with pitchforks and torches, all the way to this guy's house and demanding justice?

It has to be pride. Like being seven years old all over again and saying "I didn't want to go to your old party, anyway" when inside you're writhing with humiliation at not having been invited.

Except this is one step beyond that. There's something perverse about being so ashamed to admit that the wool has been pulled over your eyes that you'd rather act like the whole thing was your idea in the first place. You never leave the house without routinely wrapping this scarf around your head. It's a fashion statement.

Message for everyone who bought this yahoo's book on the strength of its being his autobiography: you were had. Somebody lied to you, and got away with it. The fault is his, not yours. Instead of trying to play it cool, as if being a grownup means being beyond such petty considerations as whether or not true means true, why don't you try a nice clean course of moral indignation? Call this guy the names he deserves, already.

What are you really worried about? That someone will think you're a moron for not having known what you had no way of knowing? This isn't the same thing as not knowing enough to question an anecdote that has the earmarks of an urban legend all over it. (No, Virginia, Richard Gere never had that gerbil up his -- well, anyway.) The fact is, if the cover says biography or autobiography, it's supposed to be true. It's supposed to be, at the very least, the best in the way of truth that the author could come up with. I would never put the guy who wrote that yet-another-Shakespeare-didn't-write-those-plays book in the same category as lying-autobiography-scum-boy, even though I don't see any reason to believe the Shakespeare book is "true" any more than the autobiography is. The anti-Shakespeare guy isn't a liar. He's just an imbecile. But he's at least attempting (I assume) an interpretation of actual facts. So keep his book on the nonfiction shelf, delusional though it may be. Unless it comes out that he got so zealous in his pursuit of supporting evidence for his theory that he forged some. In which case, toss him in the clink and throw away the key. Or at least make his name mud in academic circles to the point that no one will ever read or trust so much as a grocery list he writes. Life is tricky enough. We don't need tricksters deliberately messing with it. And that applies to the written life.

Some more boring full disclosure: I've written and published one biography -- a children's work. At times I feel very nervous at the thought of the words I've put out there, because I'm writing for a series of books for homeschoolers, and it's a good publisher with a good reputation and a good sales record, and so somebody is going to read my book, and that reader is going to be someone who's young enough that his or her ideas about the life in question are going to be shaped by me. I read boatloads of historical biographies when I was a kid. They have an impact. I really, really want that impact to be a positive, accurate one if I'm the one making it. Sorry to sound like Dudley Do-Right here, but it's true. It's important. The issue of what a biography is and isn't is not a purely theoretical one for me.

Let me ask you something. I'm working on my second biography now, and it's of a very famous king from a long time ago. In the course of researching him, I've learned that he came from a large family, and that he had an older brother who was first in line for the throne when Dad finally vacated it. Pretty much nothing is known about the relationship between these two brothers, or the feelings that the younger had when his older, more important sibling died young and deprived the world of what would have been a real King Arthur.

Since this is a book for children, I want it to tackle ideas that will be of interest to children. (Well, duh.) I intend to say something about how odd it would be to have a brother whose death couldn't be regarded merely as the death of a brother. Even long ago when life was much shorter and harsher and death could never be a surprise (though it might always be a shock), losing someone so closely related would be a wrenching experience. What would it be like to know that the young man you grew up with, sharing the same parents and toys and a lot of the same interests -- how would it feel to know that his death meant you'd be ruler of an entire country?

Well, that depends on what kind of person you are. The idea of being king might make you nervous, or it might be what you want more than anything in the world, or you might have uneasily mixed feelings about the whole idea. Which might give you uneasily mixed feelings about your brother.

Since the person I'll be writing about was known for his ruthless ambition, I might wonder on the page if the giddy pleasure of suddenly being the heir to a very important throne might have outweighed any sadness that he might have felt at his brother's death. If I wanted to, I could even say that given the many cold-hearted decisions he later made regarding those over whom he held life and death power, he might well not have shed a single tear when his brother shuffled off the mortal coil.

So far, so good. Valid speculation.

Nah. Too wordy. Not edgy and exciting enough. I'm trying to get people to read, not fall asleep. Gotta jazz it up a bit. I'm going to say that he wanted his brother dead. That he rejoiced in his demise.

Well, why not? It could have happened. We don't know that it didn't. It certainly sounds emotionally true. And isn't the job of the historian to make history come to life for the reader?

Mule muffins. Those aren't the facts I have before me. I know they're not the facts. If I set them down in a work that's being relied upon as a faithful representation of the life in question, I'm being the worst kind of swindler. And I don't think there's a reader out there who wouldn't agree with me there.

I don't know when it became okay to start fudging the answer to that age-old question "What is truth?" I don't know who first had the bright idea that the appropriate response to being deliberately misled is to play the sophisticate and yawningly wonder what all the fuss is about. But as a parent, teacher, student, reader, and writer, I want it to stop right now. James Frey -- there, all right, I said his damned name -- better thank whoever he thinks might be looking out for him up there that I never gave a penny or a second of my time toward reading his book. If I had, I'd be doing a lot more than bitching about it in print. I'd be putting my weight behind a well-aimed pitchfork. And I don't know how he got lucky enough that his readers haven't turned on him with one accord -- but I sure hope his luck changes. I hope he gets a million not-so-little pieces of water-buffalo dung aimed right at him every time he so much as shows his face in public.

And that's the truth.

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