Annie Dillard’s famous opening to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which a tomcat freshly returned from his nocturnal prowling leaps through the writer’s morning window, lands on her chest, and awakens her by kneading her bosom, is not based on fact. The cat, to continue, stamps bloody paw stains on Dillard’s white gown. They remind her of rose petals. Dillard admitted at a writing conference that said tomcat never clawed her awake but did scratch to consciousness a student of hers, from whom she borrowed the tale, with permission. The nature writer seized on the story as parable-ready and used it to introduce her exuberantly harrowing book on nature’s violence and beauty.
No one likely would dream of taking Dillard down, not at least for a little fibbing compensated by potent poetry. But what of James Frey, who fabricated details, especially surrounding drug addiction and arrest, in his memoir A Million Little Pieces? Oprah Winfrey, reality-committed, beat him floorward on live TV, pinning on him the charge of “liar.” It stuck, and disciples of truth throughout the land rejoiced over her successful inquisition of the inauthentic, with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times encapsulating the mood among Those Who Read: “It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying.” Oprah’s opprobrium seemed to annihilate the prevaricator’s career—Larry King’s verb, that—but Frey, like Annie’s feline, has proved not yet killable, writing a novel, Bright Shiny Morning, that Sara Nelson, in Publishers Weekly, called “un-put-downable, a real page turner, in what may come to be known as the Frey tradition.”
What is the line between Dillard as legit literary nonfictionalist and Frey as lowdown fabricator? Is Dillard’s slight rearranging of “what happened” a forgivable little fib in the service of a deeper literary “truth”? Then is Frey’s more whopper-size exaggeration a pernicious violation of the reader’s trust, in the name of bestsellerdom?
These are important questions to ask in this time when literary hoaxes far more extreme than Frey’s are common. In 2008 Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, published a memoir about her struggles as a half–Native American, half-white gang member in South-Central L.A., even though she is a middle-aged Caucasian who grew up wealthy in the San Fernando Valley. From 2000 to 2004 Laura Albert, another middle-aged woman, published three “real-life” novels under the guise of JT LeRoy, a cross-dressing, HIV-positive teenage boy who was once a prostitute, and even convinced a friend to play the role of JT in public. And in 2008 Herman Rosenblat fabricated key elements in his memoir about falling in love with his wife in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
For those who’ve read their Derrida and Debord, their Vaihinger and James, their Hayden White and Gazzaniga, the distinction society has deployed to condemn the Freys and Seltzers—between fiction, or illusion, and fact, which is reality—might seem crude. And for those who have studied Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author,” even to believe that one man or woman is the responsible creator and owner of a given text is jejune.
But the most hard-core proponent of constructivism—the world is made, not found—would wince if someone stole his research and then the thief tried to pass it off as his own. And the constructivist would do more than wince if the work he did actually publish under his name generated profit, but he was barred from claiming the money. He couldn’t be the author, after all, all authors being now dead.
Even in a world where fact is fiction and fiction fact, we require a standard by which to call some liars and others truth-tellers, to say that this is mine, that yours. One way to do this is to say that sure, on an epistemological level, we can never grasp reality as it is, but on a more practical level, we know that certain physical events occurred and others have not. We’ve agreed as a society that those physical events that actually happened—like jail time or gang wars—are real, while those that didn’t take place are not. To claim in this society that something that occurred did not, or that something that didn’t go down did, constitutes a lie, and society has generally agreed that lying is harmful—regardless of motive—because lying destroys other distinctions essential for a society’s success: between legitimate criminal evidence and bogus; ownership and fraud; trust and the lack.
So, according to this pragmatic model, which James would likely endorse, we can distinguish between truth and lie and condemn the latter, even if the standards are not universally true but temporary and probably arbitrary. But the question remains: Why would we condemn Frey while we celebrate Dillard?
Both writers are engaged in a genre known as creative nonfiction, which encompasses literary memoirs, essays, nature writing, journalism, and travel writing. Works in this genre combine fact and fiction. While authors aspire to be faithful to what actually happened, inwardly or outwardly, they select, compress, expand, and arrange the data according to literary conventions like plot, point of view, character development, symbolism, tone, and style. Creative nonfiction reports accurately as well as aesthetically.
Honoring this genre, we don’t hold Dillard and Frey to the same standards of accuracy to which we would hold a historian or a war correspondent. But even if we allow these writers imaginative room, we still expect them to stay close to actual occurrences. It is one thing for Frey to tweak his struggles with addiction to achieve maximum literary power; it is another for him to fabricate experiences entirely and make them central to his story. Because Dillard remains close to actual happenings for almost her whole book—scientific laws, places anyone can visit, parts of her history easily verifiable—we forgive her a little straying, especially when it results in such sublimity and conveys her themes so gorgeously.
We might further distinguish between Frey’s extreme fictionalizing and Dillard’s more minimal by speculating on their intentions. We could assert that Frey fabricated for financial reasons, knowing that a memoir on the harrowing experiences of an addict would probably sell better than a novel on the same, and we could conversely conclude that Dillard fudged a bit for worthier literary reasons. But such speculations would be dubious, first of all because it is almost impossible to ascertain the full depth of anyone’s intentions—so entangled with unconscious and conscious motives are intentions—and second of all because it is quite possible that Frey’s intentions were more literary than mercenary, and Dillard’s the opposite.
Ultimately, the most compelling way to distinguish between Frey’s fiction-making and Dillard’s is to claim that one is more aesthetically successful than the other. Perhaps readers condemned Frey because he violated their aesthetic expectations. Frey chose the form of the confessional memoir, in particular the memoir of suffering and redemption, most notably exemplified by Augustine’s Confessions, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, and Malcolm X’s Autobiography. For such a memoir to succeed, it must express sincerity, authenticity, one person revealing his or her deepest agonies to others. Since Frey’s language performed such states so convincingly, readers at first generally loved the book. But once they discovered that these linguistic moves lacked physical reality, they felt betrayed: what they most wanted in a memoir of this kind—raw honesty—had vanished.
Dillard decided on another form, the nature essay, whose most powerful practitioners include Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Peter Matthiessen. Here the contract with the reader differs. We look in such books not so much for sincerity as for acute observation of place, lyrical descriptions of relationships between human and globe, transformations of this rock or that river into a symbol of the whole. If the writer delivers, we don’t care so much about accuracy. So what if Thoreau didn’t really drive his nails with one blow, as bent nails around his Walden Pond home suggest? He lived on the water and it gave him life, and in his words he made the water live. That is enough.
Is the most useful standard of truth aesthetic? Is Dillard’s fiction “truer” than Frey’s because it is more beautiful—more exhilarating to readers, whose longings it generously fulfills, more intense, capacious, complex, more expressive of what lived experience is like, soothing and horrible, chaotic as well as ordered, so lovely you can barely stay inside your skin and so painful you’d just as soon pave forests as trudge in them? Is Frey’s fashioning false because it is not as exquisite, disappointing readers in its voiding of the genre contract and so striking them as phony, selfish, flat, an account not of pain and transcendence but of manipulation, deception?
Has a truth just happened to an idea?