Truthiness, Warmed Over

This topic is so last week, but I'm not going to let that stop me from saying a few words about it. It was still a hot topic all around the office, and yesterday's Chicago Tribune printed letters responding to Julia Keller's Monday defense of James Frey. That defense essentially consisted of, "Sure, he lied through his teeth, but he certainly wrote a page turner."

I'll admit right up front that I haven't read the book, so I'm really commenting on the controversy itself. It's certainly hard to ignore, though. When I went to the Trib Web site, I did a search for Oprah Frey and had to wade through forty hits before I got to Keller's article. If I'd searched even further back, I would've finally reached their original coverage of Frey's most recent appearance on Oprah's show. Over in the Chicago Reader, Michael Minor clocked the Trib's coverage the day after that episode of Oprah at one news article (a banner headline on the front page) and six columnists weighing in. I think this really means it's a controversy about Oprah being upset, but I'm more interested in the publishing side of it.

At this point, I've rewritten the following paragraphs a couple of times. (I know, I know, that's so not in the blogger's handbook. I should've written, posted, and then come back and corrected. But all I can say is that I'm an editor--it's what I do. So sue me.) I'd started off saying that I wasn't sure how Nan Talese, essentially the publisher of the book, should have handled the situation differently and writing about the standard publishing practice of putting the onus of accuracy and originality on the author. Some publishers employ fact-checkers, but that's mostly targeted at harder nonfiction titles. A memoir is soft nonfiction. While a memoir is theoretically true, there's no hiding the fact that its appeal is the personal experiences and memories of the author. I argued that most publishers would say that if a memoirist is exposed as a fraud, the shame goes to the author, that publishers were duped just as much as readers were. Should Talese have gotten copies of Frey's imprisonment records? In retrospect, certainly, but I was ready to accept the idea that a certain level of trust should exist between the writer, editor, and publisher. I even pointed out that if the issue had come up among editors at all, someone would probably have asked the question, "Why would he lie about something that could so easily be confirmed or disproved?"

But then I saw a story about Sean McDonald, A Million Little Pieces's editor, in today's New York Times. Back in September, McDonald told the Times that he "made sure that everything actually happened." Further, when the publisher had questions, McDonald had said, "James had to provide them with all kinds of verification." McDonald had left Nan Talese for another publisher by that point, so he wasn't speaking for his former employer and may not have been offering what at that point was the official Talese position. But even so, that statement changes things. It seems that McDonald no longer stands by his previous statement. On Thursday in an official release, McDonald said, "Throughout the editing process, I raised questions with James about the veracity of events he recounted in the book and in each instance he assured me that his account was accurate and true."

So where does this put us in relation to the issue of trust between writer, editor, and publisher? To Oprah, Talese essentially conveyed that she and her imprint had taken Frey at his word and he lied to them. McDonald's most recent statement suggests the same. Was there verification? At this point, who knows. Should there have been? As I said above, in retrospect, certainly. Will there be for the next memoirist who comes down the road? You can bet on it.