Memoirs of drug-addled blackouts

[novella]

So now St. Martin's Press is sticking a disclaimer on Augusten Burrough's memoirs, Running with Scissors and Dry--a little butt-covering a la James Frey.

Question is, when you publish a memoir by someone who admittedly was blacked out and drugged up most of the time, what do you expect?

Should we trust the memoirs of Liz Taylor, Liza Minelli, etc., or do we assume that their ghostwriters and agents cover their butts for them, despite their being drugged up for decades?

As a matter of fact, I just finished Symtpoms of Withdrawal by Christopher Lawford Kennedy, yet another drug-addled memoirist, and he gives some nice accounts of his Kennedy cousins doing heroin together, etc. How much of that can he really remember accurately?

I myself cannot remember most of high school, and I didn't even shoot heroin.

Where do we draw the line? Should there be a separate category of books, Unreliable Memoirs? Addicts' Fantasy Realities?

None of these folks kept journals. Memoirists like Winston Churchill and Bill Clinton are based on meticulous journals kept over years. When the average dodo sits down to write memoirs, how reliable is it anyway, even if they are trying really hard to remember the 'truth'? How well would the average TBFer do, even if completely mentally present for all of life?

 

[Peder]

Where do we draw the line? Should there be a separate category of books, Unreliable Memoirs? Addicts' Fantasy Realities?
Novella,
Yes, there should be,
Fictoirs and memoirs. Like fictalism and journalism. Fitacts and facts.
Oscar Levant set the precedent with "Memoirs of an Amnesiac."
Sorry, couldn't resist,
Peder

 

[novella]

Yeah, how about Thomas DeQuincy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac (admittedly inaccurate) . . . one could go on and on. Maybe they should all have disclaimers.

 

[Ronny]

Aren't all stories untrue, to a certain extent? If you put 10 people in a room and show them a small scene and then ask them what happened, they would all give a different story.

 

[sirmyk]

My goal is to write the world's first nonfiction novel.

 

[Shade]

You're too late, sirmyk, isn't that the genre Truman Capote claimed to have invented with In Cold Blood?

 

[Doug Johnson]

I wonder which presidential memoir will be the first to get a disclaimer?

 

[Mari]

George Burns said at the opening of one of his autobiographies that it was more of a conversation between him and his comedy writers. In another one, he said that whenever he dictated to his ghost writer with his cigar in his mouth, he was exaggerating. At some points in the text he says, "I'm puffing, I'm puffing." What a gracious way to admit to puffery.

 

[venusunfolding]

Shoot, it's not new. Even Zora Neale Hurston blatantly made up parts of her autobiography.

The memoir I just finished reading has a few drug black outs, and actually has a blurb on the back from James Frey. I always take these things with a grain of salt and just try to enjoy the story.

 

[novella]

Shoot, it's not new. Even Zora Neale Hurston blatantly made up parts of her autobiography.

.

Uh, did you read the thread? See refs to Thos. DeQuincy and Coleridge?

 

[Doug Johnson]

Not sure if we've discussed this guy, but:


Former Chapel Hill author Nasdijj won national acclaim writing memoirs about his brutal childhood as a Navajo Indian in the Southwest and as a father to two adopted sons who died of AIDS and fetal alcohol syndrome.

In truth, he was Timothy P. Barrus, a man of Scandinavian descent who grew up in a solidly middle-class neighborhood of Lansing, Mich., and had a career writing gay pornography, according to public records and several people who know Barrus.

The likelihood that Barrus had fabricated his past -- and parlayed the fiction into three successful nonfiction books -- was first raised Wednesday in a lengthy article in a Los Angeles newspaper that outlined similarities between Barrus and Nasdijj.

On Thursday, The News & Observer was able to confirm that they are the same person. The paper had a Social Security number for Nasdijj because it had paid him for free-lance work. A check of the database of public records collected by Accurint, a private company, matched Barrus to the Social Security number. And an Esquire editor said the magazine had made out a check to "Tim Nasdijj Barrus" for the 1999 article that was the author's breakthrough piece.

Barrus, 55, couldn't be located and did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview. Nor did his wife and adult daughter.

The revelation comes at a time when the publishing world is grappling with the disclosure that memoirist James Frey took liberties with his best-selling book, "A Million Little Pieces." But while Frey embellished parts of his life, Barrus appears to have made up an entirely new one.

"It's different from Frey," said Esquire magazine editor-in-chief David Granger. "Frey exaggerated. If true, this is made up from whole cloth."

 

[novella]

Yeah, Doug, I read about him. He brings to mind the infamous Ward Churchill, another fake Indian.

 

[henrietta]

So now St. Martin's Press is sticking a disclaimer on Augusten Burrough's memoirs, Running with Scissors and Dry--a little butt-covering a la James Frey. Question is, when you publish a memoir by someone who admittedly was blacked out and drugged up most of the time, what do you expect?

In Frey's case, the editors should have expected something b/c from what I've read, they had the idea of marketing his novel as memoir in the first place. I am repulsed at how the publishing world seems to be spinning this as a matter of the unwashed not 'getting it' that memoir isn't 100% factual.