Mr. Frey's embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the "writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story," his casual attitude about how people remember the past - all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in Oprah Winfrey's new selection for her book club, announced yesterday: "Night," Elie Wiesel's devastating 1960 account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
If the memoir form once prized authenticity above all else - regarding testimony as an act of paying witness to history - it has been evolving, in the hands of some writers, into something very different. In fact, Mr. Frey's embellishments and fabrications in many ways represent the logical if absurd culmination of several trends that have been percolating away for years. His distortions serve as an illustration of a depressing remark once made by the literary theorist Stanley Fish - that the death of objectivity "relieves me of the obligation to be right"; it "demands only that I be interesting."
That pretty much nails it for me.
I have no problem with any of Frey's embellishments, and I have no problem with him calling his book a memoir. I have no problem with the statement that the history of salt explains the world or that three schmucks typing on their keyboards have the authority to call Walter Cronkite a fool.
I don't think that the folks who put forward such arguments are lying. I do think that, in each case, "truth and accuracy are far less important than the ability to achieve a suitable response in the audience." And I think that the percieved importance of the latter increases annually.
I recommend the whole Kakutani article if you care about this sort of stuff.
