I first heard the phrase “the stench of self” attached to memoirs at the Mayborn Nonfiction Writers Conference in 2006. In the ‘08 Mayborn keynote, Bob Shacochis gave his take on the genre, describing it as “thrown face first into other people’s laundry baskets.” Memoir wallows, he said, in adolescent narcissism of the “Oh-my-god-my-life-is-so-messed-up-that’s-what-makes-me-unique” variety.
Shacochis made these assessments only in passing, but the fact that journalists toss off such cavalier disparagements may be even more bothersome than a full frontal attack. Why does an entire genre suffer from the indictment of its worst exemplars—narratives of drugged teeny-throbs, buxom sexpots, father-diddlers, and baby-rapists? The snippy part of me wants to counter, “You’re a journalist, eh? You must know Stephen Glass.” But instead I’ll ponder whether memoir deserves to be such an easy target.
What makes a reporter different from a memoirist anyway?
• There’s the question of sources: Barbara Walters interviews Ferdinand and Imelda; Maxine Hong Kingston interviews her mother and herself.
• There’s documentation: A memoirist gussies up half-remembered quotes from 30 years ago; a journalist includes a phrase from last week only after consulting an informant, taking meticulous notes, and suffering a fact-checker.
• There’s location: A journalist surveys Everest trekkers from a 4-mile-high base camp or follows Teddy Roosevelt’s footprints up the Amazon; I, in my cork-lined room, never risk freezing my ass off or wiping it with toxic jungle foliage.
• There’s sociability: Journalists toss back their Jack Daniel’s in gaggles; we memoirists nurse our toddies alone.
• There are ethical constraints: Misrepresenting the color of one’s prom dress prompts indulgent smiles; inventing quotes from a public prosecutor gets one fired.
Journalists pride themselves on their standards. A few years back, memoirist Vivian Gornick faced an unanticipated buzz-saw when the public applied reporter’s rules to her work. She’d caused the kafuffle by admitting she consolidated characters and conflated scenes. Why the fuss? she asked; memoir tells truth through accretion, conflation, vignette, and dialogue like the rest of belles lettres. By contrast, reporter Lee Hancock admitted almost apologetically to the Mayborn assembly that she’d transported a Katrina refugee to Baton Rouge. Journalists aren’t supposed to lay down the pen and pick up the hitchhiker; that’s part of their code, the promise never to influence the story. It couldn’t be part of mine. If I weren’t in the middle, doing and feeling, there would be no writing. To a journalist it must seem like I make up the rules as I go along.
Apart from occasional plagiarizing, reporters who stray sacrifice literal truth to vividness. That is, they act like memoirists. The list of journalists cut loose in the past decade for fabricating stories, quotes, or informants includes a who’s who of Pulitzer Prize nominees whose stories gained a following precisely because they were so vivid, so shocking, so personal. They wrote for the most respected publications. Stephen Glass (outed in 1998) wasn’t the first—or last—at The New Republic; Ruth Shalit had preceded him by three years, and Scott Thomas Beauchamp faked his Iraq war diaries less than a decade later.
Other malefactors have included Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle at The Boston Globe (1998), AP’s Christopher Newton (2002), the trio of Michael Finkel, Jayson Blair, and Rick Bragg at The New York Times (2002-2003), USA Today’s Jack Kelley (2004), Diana Griego Erwin at The Sacramento Bee (2005), and Jay Forman at Slate (finally owning up in 2007 to his 2001 inventions). A few, like Tom Junod at Esquire (2001), managed to ride out the storm; in defending Junod’s fabricated profile of REM singer Michael Stipe, his editor claimed the magazine had a duty “to amuse and entertain our audience.”
The need to entertain is where the rub produces the blister. Bored readers stop buying magazines. One Mayborn speaker after another advised us nonfiction practitioners—if we want to keep readers reading—to perfect the craft of storytelling, of bringing characters to life through scene and dialogue. Readers demand not only colorful detail but a narrative arc—“Stories must have beginnings, middles, and ends.” And as Tim Madigan put it, “There better be a damn good payoff at the end.”
All this is sound advice for reporters intent on selling their wares; dangerous advice, though, when editors—feeling the pressure from publishers committed to the bottom line—fish for more and more vibrancy from rewrite to rewrite. The case of James Frey points up the lure of dollar signs in the la-la land of minimal accountability: following the revelation that Frey had reinvented his life story, readers began to doubt the reliability of memoir, but when sales of A Million Little Pieces ballooned after his dustup with Oprah he could pitch a sequel for a seven-figure contract. I can see why journalists might resent the rules he plays under, but reporters produce stories shading toward license—even if they fall short of lies—for the same reason Frey revises his three hours in a drunk tank into three months behind razor wire. The practice makes for juicier stories. Juice sells.
In A Million Little Pieces, the fuzzy standards of memoir and the economics of the publishing industry met readers’ genre expectations to produce the perfect storm. Frey could fool a fine editor like Nan Talese because the arc in his story, the rise from degradation to authorhood, reaffirmed what her readers wanted to believe in a format they cherished. Resolution into a satisfying arc began with the first memoir, Augustine’s Confessions, in which the saint progressed in hindsight from sin to salvation. On that pattern, Poor Richard, through pluck and good sense, inevitably emerged as Ben Franklin. Rousseau added the fillip of abandoning bastard children on the trail toward becoming an icon of flawed humanity. This genre-roadmap prepared the route for Frey.
The temptation to impose a predictable arc afflicts news reporting too. Before Nick Heil got to work supplying the shadows that enrich Dark Summit, the media had latched onto the easy vilification of Everest tour-outfitter/promoter Russell Brice. Some Antichrist had to be held accountable for “the most shameful act in the history of mountaineering” when 40 climbers trudged past a dying Brit. Brice may have borne some responsibility, but the moral outrage in the media reflected a need for scapegoating among the public that embraced the simple morality tale. In Heil’s subtler reworking, we still find the breath-snatching detail that engages readers—we pass enough grotesquely frozen corpses on our way up and down the mountain—but Heil refuses to supply the expected narrative arc. The climbers had no way, short of calling in a mythical alpine Medivac, to wrestle the stiffening body down the mountainside; nor had they reason to believe its owner would arise to reclaim his flesh if it ever thawed. In Dark Summit, the payoff comes not in a titillating exposure of evil or in the heartening triumph of good, but in bleak truths about the human condition: sometimes, no matter how much we hope for a Disney ending, the transcendent dream gutters out a few hundred yards short of the summit; sometimes we find the sacred dome already pockmarked with urine from alpha tourists; sometimes people just die.
Closure, the reassuring demonstration of cause and effect where we all get what we deserve, shapes stories, not lives—unless we impose the structure on the narratives we construct about ourselves. Lack of closure, however, may be too unsettling for most readers. Memory itself may remodel personal narratives into meaningful arcs so that we can believe we matter in a world that otherwise fails to notice. In the Kiowa folktale that N. Scott Momaday related at the ‘08 Mayborn banquet, Dragonfly believed he could pray the sun out of the ground; with such a worldview, he couldn’t permit himself to oversleep. If we doubted that we could influence the outcome so that the story eventually comes out right, we would have no reason to wake up in the morning. Who would buy books if the stories in them routinely effaced human significance? Principled writers have to hope, as they probe what it means to be human, that readers learn to look for other payoffs.
Reporters and memoirists offer complementary paths toward complex truths. Brian Sweany urged, “The most important thing is getting inside the head of your interviewee. Let that person tell the story.” The prospect of cold calling would send me to my bed quicker than a migraine, but I can get into my own head, where I can question my informant more ferociously than I could any stranger. David Gregory becomes an emotional predator when he asks the terminally ill Tony Snow, “How does it feel to know your children will grow up without a father?” but I can legitimately pose the question to myself as I receive the inaugural drip-drip of Taxotere in an oncologist’s chair in the company of my 7-year-old son. A reporter could never extract such intimacies from a rape victim without compounding the violation.
Sure, the self stinks—with a sweet over-ripeness that lures me in. Like Montaigne, the first modern reporter to probe his interior for insights into the human macrocosm, I write because the winey scent from the neglected pear orchard in my Indian summer clings to my nose hairs. Curious, I delve into myself—not unlike a reporter following rumors of a gang initiation down murky alleyways. We dig deep and reveal what we uncover not because we respect an external code of ethics but because we promise ourselves to tell the truth. There will always be those who fail to honor their deeper selves and thereby silence their better angels. Some may write memoir; others may be reporters. Maybe by next summer the journalists at the Mayborn Conference will see that, for good or ill, we’re all in this thing together.
George Newtown
(Note: Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this piece derive from notes taken at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest, held in Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX, on July 18-20, 2008.)
