Comments on: Face It, We Love this Stuff

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:27:02 +0000

Nice to see a mention of Cliff Walk. That was an especially nice memoir.

You’re right in that the “blame” is on ourselves, readers and buyers who soak up those stories. Sometimes, I’m not sure if I even care anymore if memoirs are real or not. Then again, I’ve always preferred fiction anyway.

By: sgj

sgj — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:41:34 +0000

these walls between fiction and non-fiction breaking down’s kind of fun, I think. once ‘accuracy’ or ‘verifiablity’ or whatever ‘truth’-word’s the good one stops mattering, then what’s left is the quality of the piece. whether or not it has literary integrity. which I’m still not cynical enough to think doesn’t matter to the audience.

but, to respond specifically to your post: yep. we can’t complain, because we did it, and are doing it, even now. even gleefully.

By: djlufkin

djlufkin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:40:04 +0000

The appeal of soap operas has always been universal. All that’s changed is the book industry. Literary is just another genre to “these people.”

By: Nancy Rommelmann

Nancy Rommelmann — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:59:34 +0000

I agree; at the end of the day, it’s the readers who buy the books and keep the market for these “victim triumphs over all!” memoirs going. Remember the Oprah fans who veritably raked their chests and keened in indignation when they found out Frey was a phony? These women needed some sort of hero; he was their man, and now that he wasn’t, what were they to do? (That’s an easy fix: buy the next hyperbolic memoir.) “A Million Little Pieces” may be transparently false, but as you say, the reader doesn’t care; she’s hooked on (as I said in the Laura Albert piece) the charge one gets from thinking something that sounds too bad to be true, actually isn’t.