Reality Hunger (12 page)

“JT LeRoy” was nothing more or less than a highly developed pen name.

Margaret Seltzer wanted so badly not to be the person she was (upper-middle-class girl from the Valley) that she imagined
herself all the way into strangers’ lives, and cared so much about bringing attention to those lives that she phrased her tale as memoir, because relatively few people care about novels anymore. Misha Defonseca, author of the Holocaust “memoir”
Surviving with Wolves
—pretty much the same thing.

Frey’s narrative: frat boy in free fall arises from misanthropy and is salvaged by literary industry, which is now a subset of multimedia saturation, of which Oprah forms a higher denomination. Oprahcam tells us that we are all abused in some way, but we need arbiters to sift through the dirt for the story that can be marketed as emblematic. We begged Frey to produce self-flagellating myth, and he complied. Frey and millions behind him line up to humiliate themselves for the sole purpose of being marketed. It’s so common to expect an abuse story that we have to stifle our yawns when we hear of further deceit, recrimination, backstabbing. Frey, that Puritan, witnessed what it means to be senseless while on drugs, but he can’t admit he had fun. He made more sense when he was wasted.

Fragments, The Hand That Signed the Paper, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, The Honored Society, Forbidden Love, A Million Little Pieces, Surviving with Wolves, Love and Consequences, Angel at the Fence:
all in turn were used as paper tigers to once again misposition memoir as failed journalism.

Frey was crucified for a handful of inaccuracies in no way essential to the character and spirit of the book. All our sins are passed onto/unto him. Violence implies redemption: our sudden
hatred toward Frey was due to the fact that he didn’t hurt himself badly or violently enough to justify himself as self-perpetrator.

Kaavya Viswanathan’s
How Opal Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life:
a piece of popular fiction, written quickly for undemanding young readers, displays some “similarities” to an earlier work of popular fiction for undemanding young readers. Excuse me, but isn’t the entire publishing industry built on telling the exact same stories over and over again? Since when is that news? This is teen literature; it’s genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the
Times:
to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the
Times
’s words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of minor differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence. Trial by Google.

I don’t feel any of the guilt normally attached to “plagiarism,” which seems to me organically connected to creativity itself.

(Ambitious) memoir isn’t fundamentally a chronicle of experience; rather, memoir is the story of consciousness contending with experience.

What I believe about memoir is that you just happen to be using the nuts and bolts of your own life to illustrate your vision. It isn’t really me; it’s a character based on myself that I made up in order to illustrate things I want to say. In other words, I think memoir is as far from real life as fiction is. I think you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.

Proust said that he had no imagination; what he wanted was reality, infused with something else.
In Search of Lost Time
begins and ends with the actual thoughts of the author; it’s the manifestation of what the author must think, based on what he does in fact think. The book, by being about Marcel, a writer, is as much about the writing as it is about anything that “happens.” I don’t mean that everything we think is what we truly feel or that only in thought are we free of the lies and illusions of the world. I mean that you have a right, as a thinking person, to think what you think and that the closer you stick to the character of thought in your writing, the more license you have to claim that you’re not making things up. Frey, for example, wrote but didn’t think,
I was in prison for three months
. Instead, he probably thought something more like
I was in prison for three months, man; I was in fucking prison for three months; give it to them; throw it down
[their throats];
they’ll take it; they don’t know what I went through; I’m tough
[goes to the mirror to make sure],” etc. That is, he made up the prison part: he fictionalized it (without first admitting to having done so).