Pretty much everyone and their brother have heard of James Frey, author of the memoir A Million Little Pieces. Frey marketed the book as a memoir of his life, and then had it revealed that he had made quite a bit up and embellished a lot more. There were (are) two sides to this debate. One, the side that I am on, held that Frey deceived the reader by passing off fiction as truth. I feel very strongly about this – if I am reading something that I believe to be true, I do not want to find out that in fact part of is not. I feel that this is breaking a promise on the part of the writer to be truthful with the reader. The other camp, which is smaller, says that it really doesn’t matter if part of it was made up, because they don’t expect a memoir to be 100% truthful, as memory is subjective.

As a writer, I feel that if I am writing fiction I can write whatever I want within the guidelines of slander, libel, thinly veiled abuse of a real person, etc., and people will know that it is a made-up narrative. And when I write non-fiction it needs to be factual or I will loose the readers’ faith in my account. Obviously it impossible to be totally and completely exact, as memory is subjective, but an author needs to get as close true the facts as possible – and when a writer deliberately manipulates facts, I feel they are being deceitful towards their readers and are breaking the bond of trust that exists between them.

The school of thought that some tweaking is ok gets murkier the more cases you examine. What about J.T. LeRoy, the supposedly teenage male hustler who was in fact the imaginary product of Laura Albert? Albert not only went so far as to pretend to be J.T. in public, but she carried out this charade for nine years total. She played on people’s emotions and feelings about abused children, AIDS, prostitution and other vulnerable subjects. So, is this really considered acceptable for a memoir? Does the amount of untruths diferenciate it from A Million Little Pieces?

Now another memoir has been uncovered as fictional. Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, a best selling memoir by Misha Defonseca that was also made into movie has been revealed to be a hoax. In both this and Albert’s cases there is almost nothing personally truthful about in their writing, and therefore their books are works of fiction, not memoirs, and in my mind that means they deliberately deceived their readers.

So what differentiates Defonseca and Albert from Frey? In my mind not much. A little lie or a big lie is still a lie, and if I’m reading something non-fictional, I don’t want to be lied to at all. I have to admit, these and other cases have in a large part turned me off of memoirs – as a reader I place a certain trust in an author to be honest with me about what they are presenting, and in my reading as in life, I don’t like being lied to.