Jumping for that Elusive Truth
Novelist
Christian Bauman ponders the triumphs and tribulations of memoirists
James Frey and Anthony Swofford and the lure of the publishing industry’s
nonfiction fix
I wrote my first novel—The Ice Beneath
You, published by Simon & Schuster in the fall of 2002—for
the most part in 1998 and 1999. The novel grew out of a series of
short stories I’d written, and those original short stories
grew, in many cases, from a series of events that happened during
my early twenties. Those events were, essentially, my life: uneducated
young man born smack in the middle of the Generation X demographic,
riddled with emotional and addiction issues, joins the army and
gets sent to war—twice. Those who both know me well and have
read The Ice Beneath You as it was finally printed also
know that the similarities between the real me and the novel are
for the most part only surface similarities: yes, I rode a Greyhound
bus to San Francisco (and back); yes, I served in Somalia with a
platoon of half-jacked-up lunatics (I mean that in the most loving
manner); yes, we saw some of the darkest shades of humanity over
there; yes, it didn’t go well for many of us when we came
home. But The Ice Beneath You is a novel. An autobiographical
clearing of the throat, as they say, as many first novels are—but
no question about it, a novel.
I’d thought I was writing my novel alone. I felt alone—I’d
felt alone most of my life. That’s one of the reasons I was
writing. But it turns out there were a few other guys who’d
had a hard time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of them
with life stories spiritually similar to my own, and as I wrote,
they sat at their own tables, with their own demons and talents,
and worked their own solitudes. A few of them weren’t bad
writers. One of them, a former Marine named Anthony Swofford, was
writing fiction about the Gulf War and the men and boys who ended
up stranded in its sand storms. Another would-be novelist named
James Frey was channeling his addictions into a feverish, frenetic
prose. Both of these fellows had difficulty selling their fiction.
It wasn’t, I imagine, a question of their talent. They can
both write. The trouble was, in fact, their chosen subject matter
in the world of literary fiction. Swofford, I’ve read, was
told no one would buy fiction like this in late 1990s literary America.
I believe it, because I was getting the same rejection notes.
“If you were Tom Clancy we’d know what to do with you,”
quipped one rejecting editor in response to an early draft of The
Ice Beneath You. “But you’re not Tom Clancy. You’re
Darcey Steinke, with a hand grenade.”
I took this as a compliment, but apparently it wasn’t meant
that way because no one would buy the novel, and often with similar
rationale. Likewise, Swofford published an early story in Esquire,
but no book publisher followed up with an offer for his fiction.
Frey was similarly spurned.
Somewhere in all this, another guy approximately our age living
in Brooklyn named Dave Eggers published a memoir. It sold pretty
well. Editors and agents—as is their wont—took notice
and declared it a phenomenon; narrative nonfiction as the ticket
to publication success, BASED ON A TRUE STORY as formula. And the
rejection letters from New York began taking on a new twist: “Clearly
this is based on you, right? Have you considered memoir?”
Well, who hadn’t? It was hard to argue with the bestseller
lists: the Believer himself, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Augusten
Burroughs, et al, were burning up the charts. (While back in the
land of the novel, Darcey Steinke reaped not much more than critical
acclaim, with or without hand grenades.)
An editor at Scribner posed the memoir question to struggling fiction
writer Swofford. The former Marine went back to the drawing board
and out came Jarhead. Frey, who’d actually finished
a novel, found himself in similar straits and took similar advice:
add the prefix non to the word fiction and voila, A Million
Little Pieces.
It is hard to argue with the results of their decisions. Mr. Swofford’s
writing went from literary fiction that no pre-9/11 publisher would
touch to war memoir that landed on the cover of The New
York Times Book Review (just for starters). Mr. Frey’s
passionate, idiosyncratic, difficult-to-get-past-the-marketing-people
novel became an overcome-and-survive memoir that has had not one
but now two lives on the bestseller lists.
Both of these authors have experienced difficulties of late. There
have been grumblings from family members of some who populate the
pages of Jarhead about misrepresentation. In addition,
The New York Times reports that the screenwriter who turned
Mr. Swofford’s memoir into a movie may have lifted scenes
from Joel Turnipseed’s book Baghdad Express. Mr.
Frey’s difficulties, brought to light by TheSmokingGun.com
and then an AP wire story this week, seem even deeper—he wildly
exaggerated or even invented many of the pivotal moments of A
Million Little Pieces and its sequel. This wouldn’t be
a problem except for the fact that the book is supposed to be, you
know, “true.”
Reading between the lines of the printed reactions from Mr. Frey
to TheSmokingGun.com, I see more than a little surprise on Frey’s
part, and a sort of lack of comprehension of the fuss. I think I
understand where that feeling is coming from. Because Mr. Frey,
like Mr. Swofford, is at heart a novelist. Novelists certainly can
write memoirs, but Jarhead and A Million Little Pieces
shouldn’t have been memoirs. They were meant to be novels,
first novels, grand, sweeping, passionate novels, written by young
men with an inherent understanding of drama, poetry of language,
narrative arc, character, fiction.
I couldn’t say that Scribner and Doubleday did these two
writers a disservice. It is difficult to argue with results in the
millions—both dollars and readers—and any such statement
from a writer whose own two novels have sold less than 20,000 copies
combined is suspect. But I think Mr. Frey and Mr. Swofford have
more in common with me than demographic. I think neither of them
spent their teens and twenties wanting to be a memoirist, an autobiographer,
a mirrored journalist. Mr. Frey, who once burned up press pages
declaring himself a greater writer than this one or that one, and
Mr. Swofford, who went from the Marines to holy Iowa, wanted to
be Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, James Jones, Salman Rushdie, Russell
Banks.
Somewhere along their journey to these fabled shores Mr. Frey and
Mr. Swofford jumped ship. Or, perhaps my clichéd metaphor
is backward; perhaps the problem is that this journey requires
a jump, and they never jumped at all. Mr. Frey in particular talks
in interviews like someone who always thought he would jump, someone
who believed he had, in fact, jumped. He writes in his memoir about
seeking “the truth” and the sanctity of “the truth”
(ironic, in light of his current predicament). But truth is a slippery
and elusive concept. Hemingway talked about writing “one true
sentence,” but any novelist knows the old man didn’t
mean “true” the way a journalist means “true.”
Today the Times reported: “[W]hen Doubleday decided to publish
[A Million Little Pieces] as nonfiction, Mr. Frey said,
he did not have to change anything. ‘It was written exactly
as it was published,’ he said.”
I wonder if, instead, the book had been published exactly as it
had been written, might Mr. Frey have come closer to his truth.
Certainly financially poorer, both of them, had they made different
decisions, and yet I wonder if Mr. Swofford and Mr. Frey might have
brushed closer to their own truths had they written their novels
and jumped.
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