Gonzo San Francisco columnist Mark Morford rants and raves today about the recent exposure of several high-profile “non-fiction” books as being frauds (notably the recent exposure of the Oprah-Winfrey-approved A Million Little Pieces by James Frey). While I agree with writers who are now decrying the negative effect these books have on author credibility and readers’ trust, there’s absolutely nothing new about books being marketed as absolutely “true stories” of someone’s personal experiences that turn out to be, at best, heavily exaggerated and embellished, or at worst, complete fabrications. Some LJer’s might be old enough, for example, to remember the 1971 anti-drug-and-hippie screed Go Ask Alice, by “Anonymous”. Purporting to be the actual, posthumously published diary of a teenager who ran away from home and got involved in the drug scene, and supposedly died of an overdose, this book raised my skepticism when I read it as a teen. It was just too obviously didactic and too much of it rang false. Lo and behold, it was exposed as a hoax–but is still in print and still being marketed as “a real diary.”
The ludicrous Michelle Remembers (1980), an alleged “true story” of a woman’s “recovered memories,” launched the whole “Satanic Ritual Abuse” hysteria. After costing law enforcement millions of dollars and destroying a number of innocent people’s lives, “Satanic Ritual Abuse” was entirely debunked, and the author of the original book confessed that the story was fabricated. While this book is not in print, it is still easily available from second-hand sellers, and there are plenty of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who still accept this story, others like it, and Satanic Ritual Abuse as absolute fact. (The devil has just pulled the wool over everyone else’s eyes.)
When the 1977 book The Amityville Horror was released, I was immediately suspicious–because about six years earlier I had read the original Good Housekeeping article, “Our Dream House was Haunted” which included a few of the details in the book (the persistent fly infestation, for example) but none of the “demonic” oogy-boogy that made the so-called “true story” so moralizingly scary. Lo and behold, The Amityville Horror was exposed as a hoax. But it’s still in print, and there are still thousands of people who believe every word of it, and it was recently made into a new movie. The book no longer announces “A True Story” on the cover, but I don’t know if current editions still include author Jay Anson’s statement that “to the best of my knowledge” everything in the book is true.
In 1926, famously sardonic writer H.L. Mencken wrote, “No one in this world, so far as I know…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” What’s disturbing about A Million Little Pieces isn’t the fact that it turns out to be largely fiction (gasp. I’m shocked), but the fact that it has so many well-known predecessors, and the publishing industry and the reading public still can’t seem to catch on. Both lurid “true adventure” stories and “I was lost and now I’m saved” stories of personal redemption from the depths are suspect almost by definition. Such stories have an ancient history of being exaggerated and embellished for entertainment and/or teaching purposes. They’re also extremely popular genres. It’s easy to see why self-made woman Oprah Winfrey would fall for Frey’s tale–it’s less easy to understand why she would accept the rationalizations for forgiving his mendacity.