I was thinking about this exact issue while listening to the piece on it on NPR yesterday afternoon. I recently read All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, which was awesome. She talks about accuracy in a forward or an afterward and spells out the ways in which she polished reality, which are pretty minor. She also notes the obvious: this is based on her memory, she's checked things as well as she can to confirm their accuracy but there are always going to be people who remember things differently and there's no way to know at this point who's right
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I'd disagree slightly with your characterization of Frey's writing--large portions of A Million Little Pieces are made up entirely, such as the 87-day jail sentence that never happened. I think it's only because that latest fake memoirs are such completely loony outliers on the continuum that Frey starts to look reasonable by comparison.
Your comment about people reading memoirs for the drama brings up something else I've been mulling over: that all the fake memoirists tell tales of such extremity and victimhood. And yeah, most memoirs are by people whose lives have been out of the ordinary in some way--otherwise what's the draw?-- but with these guys it's like they've got literary Munchausen's. And what's a shame is that from what I can tell, they all had enough real material in their lives to write good memoirs. They just would've had to be better writers to do it.
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Your comment about people reading memoirs for the drama brings up something else I've been mulling over: that all the fake memoirists tell tales of such extremity and victimhood. And yeah, most memoirs are by people whose lives have been out of the ordinary in some way--otherwise what's the draw?-- but with these guys it's like they've got literary Munchausen's. And what's a shame is that from what I can tell, they all had enough real material in their lives to write good memoirs. They just would've had to be better writers to do it.
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