Re: Million Little Pieces -- Unofficial Chris Cornell Forum

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Date Posted: 12:48:30 02/12/06 Sun
Author: tg
Subject: Re: Million Little Pieces
In reply to: lump 's message, "Million Little Pieces" on 15:15:58 01/27/06 Fri

Reality Bites
Do disclaimers give memoirists license to invent?
By Meghan O'Rourke

In 2002, a man published a memoir chronicling his substance abuse and the months he spent in jail after committing a crime. When a reporter discovered that the memoir was built around a fabrication, the author defended his embellishments in the name of literary license: "What I was doing was a literary genre known as a memoir," he explained, and pointed to a disclaimer in his book noting that identifying details had been changed. The man was not James Frey. He was Jimmy A. Lerner, the author of You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish, published by Broadway Books. The fabrication was a significant one. The book describes Lerner's murder of a thuggish 6-foot-3 maniac he calls "the Monster," in a drug-fueled fight to the death in a hotel room. In fact, as David Kirkpatrick later reported in the New York Times Magazine, Lerner had actually killed a 5-foot-4 former medical equipment salesman who may not have been armed.

Confronted with Lerner's and Frey's blithe willingness to tell lies, it's time to ask: How much leeway does a disclaimer really give an author? Take the disclaimers that James Frey and his publishers recently announced they're appending to forthcoming editions of A Million Little Pieces. "I altered events and details all the way through the book. [One such embellishment] involved jail time I served, which in the book is three months, but which in reality was only several hours," Frey writes in a defensive three-page "Author's Note" that avoids cut-and-dried accountability. He insists that his changes were artistically motivated�serving "what I felt was the greater purpose of the book"�and studiously avoids the word fabrication. Meanwhile, Doubleday's "Publisher's Note" may strike some readers as evasive at best: "We bear a responsibility for what we publish, and apologize to the reading public for any unintentional confusion surrounding the publication of A Million Little Pieces," Doubleday writes, announcing that it also plans to take out ads "concerning these developments." Precisely what these ads would contain is unclear.

The original function of a disclaimer�which commonly read, "Names and identifying details have been changed"�was to protect the publisher from being sued by people who recognized themselves in an author's portrait. The disclaimers offered by Frey and Lerner, however, serve the opposite purpose. These disclaimers protect the authors from our realization that the people in their "nonfiction" books are not real people at all. Rather, these once "real" people have been so altered as to be inventions�fictions serving the author's story of redemption. Nothing about these caveats protects identities; nor are they present merely to suggest that the author's memory is imperfect or note that elisions have been made for narrative economy.

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