a million little pieces and james frey and oprah winfrey and truth

In the wake of revelations by TheSmokingGun that best-selling author James Frey fabricated some of the supposedly-seamier details of his life in his 2003 book A Million Little Pieces, literary pundits have not unexpectedly rushed into print, condemning or defending Mr. Frey (mostly the former) in the past week. Lawsuits have been threatened, and denials and (re)affirmations are all around us. In a recent posting on his website, www.bigjimindustries.com, Frey says:

"This is the latest investigation into my past, and the latest attempt to discredit me. So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt. I stand by my book, and by my life."

While working through a number of predictable essays about Frey's work and his purported fabrications, ranging from the "if it is true to you, it is true"-variety to "unless you can document it, it isn't true"-type, the strongest sentiment I was left with was that no one was very helpful in looking at the genre of memoir principally because there is an improper assumption running through almost all the essays. That assumption is that you can get it more or less right the first time around. These essays err because they think that your first attempt at telling your life's story can actually say not only what you want to say but something that actually is true about your life. I have written two autobiographies so far, and I learned within a year of writing the second that I will have to write at least one more to correct the glaring inadequacies of the first two. Thus, Frey's critics and supporters are both wrong because of the implicit assumption that there is a way to write your life and that you can do it correctly the first time. But with Mr. Frey being only 36 years-of-age, I wonder if much of anything he says about his life should be taken seriously, even if it was meticulously documented and footnoted.

Writing an Autobiography

I don't know why some people call them "autobiographies" and some call them "memoirs." I think the latter is used by people with more degrees after their name than those who use the former, and that they also probably spell the word "center" as "centre" and "medieval" as "mediaeval." Perhaps these documents are sometimes called "memoirs" in order secretly to avoid an experience I had with my mother when I had penned my first autobiography in 1991. I called her, breathlessly, with the news that I had finished my autobiography. Her response was a laconic. "That's great, Bill. But who is it about?" With a response like that ringing in my ears, I am ready to take on the question of why one needs to write at least three autobiographies in order to "get it right."

1. Your first autobiography isn't very useful because it is captive to ideologies or ideas that you want to present about life and about your life. That is, people with enough ambition to put their lives on paper almost always do so because they want to make a "point" through their lives. It may be that hard work pays or that religious faith is worthwhile or that, in the experience of our day, redemption is possible even for those who have experienced significant setbacks in life. The pressure to make life "make sense," especially if you are writing an autobiography at a comparatively young age (I wrote my first at age 39), is almost overwhelming. In my own case, I had moved in August 1990 from a busy/frenetic life in Portland, OR where I was a professor at a small college, and then Interim Pastor of a large church (sprinkled with an editorial tenure at the Oregonian and a five-year stint on the board of a very visible community college) to a sleepy Kansas town to become a history professor and felt that I had to "justify" this change to myself in some way. I wasn't aware that this was one of the reasons for writing an autobiography in the summer of 1991, but as I get further away from the event, I see it as an occasion to try to show why Kansas "made sense" after my previous 38 years. In addition, when writing the autobiography, I wanted to make the religious metaphor supreme--that whatever sense I could make of my life was because of a gracious God who was providentially guiding me all the days of my life. In fact, I think now that had I died right after writing that autobiography, my estate may have become considerably enriched because it is such an upbeat and God-honoring story.

The Second Autobiography

2. But then I wrote a second autobiography in the summer of 2004, just before and after my 52nd birthday. When I thought about what I was trying to do with the 2004 autobiography that I didn't do in 1991, I would say that it was to secularize the story of my life. Or, to put the words differently, I got rid of the sense of "my life as unfolding drama guided by God" and decided that I needed to bring people into some of the low points of not simply the years between 1991 and 2004 but of the time before 1991, which I had glossed over in the first memoir because of my desire unconsciously to support an overarching ideology. But within a year after I finished this second autobiography, of which I was immensely proud for several months after its completion (especially when some friends told me that someone ought to make a movie out of it), I saw its inadequacy. The reason is that I realized I was still trying too hard to argue that life made fairly easy sense and that there were identifiable lessons to be learned from it by scratching not too deeply beneath its surface. Oh, to be sure, the tone of the 2nd was quite different from the 1st. Whereas the former dripped with a kind of optimism and "good will towards men" that would make you think I was a program officer for Moral Re-Armament, the latter was suffused with a kind of wry irony and sense of gentle self-deprecation and humor. Yet, for all its relativistic tone, the second one still had a edge of defensiveness to it, a sense of having surmounted challenges or overcome wrongs. For example, I would admit that I was one part precocious and another part pain in the ass in childhood, but I still would try to tell a story by giving a teleological explanation that concluded that things were really going pretty well in the summer of 2004.

Conclusion

But in the 1 1/2 years since completing the second autobiography, I have thought more than once that I would need to write a third. The third, at least at this juncture, will be occupied with questions that I didn't have the knowledge or courage to ask about in the first two autobiographies--regarding the effect of parental attitudes towards me, my "role" in my family of origin, my sense of nagging failure, a probe of what and when I have really loved or not loved in life and why I can feel so dramatically full and utterly empty at the same time. The third autobiography should help me discover the things that still scare me. And, then, I will probably discover that I need a fourth and possibly a fifth autobiography.

But once all this autobiographical process becomes fixed in my mind, I begin to see the debate over the "truthfulness" of Frey's Million Little Pieces as terribly misplaced. That anyone at age 36 could say "I stand by my life," is pretty much of a non-starter with me. I don't know what it means.

I think, however, that we do want people who can put things in simple terms right before us. I don't decry that. I strive to do that all the time as I teach law to my students, principally because I think that if you spend enough time in law, you can present even seemingly difficult concepts in fairly straightforward language. But I am frankly not interested in people who can tell a story of redemption regarding their lives. I wrote a redemption autobiograpy in 1991 and a redemption biograpy (of my former student and "1000 Points of Light"-Winner Shawn Huff) in 1995. I think, however, when I hit my mid-40s, I wasn't interested in redemption stories, even though my editors were. Fear, love, tears, our soiled humanity and glimpses of light and unexpected joy are now some of my major categories. Redemption is just too simple.

1669