Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

How accurate are your books

11:19 / 31.01.06

This really springs out of a this slashdot story and the revelation that James Frey's supposed autobiog. A Million Little Pieces was actually a pack of lies...

One member of the book publishing industry has gone on record to state profit-margins in publishing don't allow for hiring fact-checkers.

An editor friend of mine confided inme that he didn't hold the editorial standards of modern books in as high a regard as those published in the early C20th.

So in these days of wikipedia, are people worried about the accuracy of the information that they are being sold? Would you be willing to pay more for books that had been fact-checked more thoroughly?

14:21 / 31.01.06

Unless it's by an already 'known' public figure though, it must be difficult to fact-check somebody's 'autobiography.' And really, why would you bother? Tellingly I think, James Frey's adventures in rehab were, at least according to last Sunday's Observer, originally submitted as fiction, and roundly rejected by pretty much everyone, before someone at Doubleday, Random House or wherever came up with the idea of presenting them as fact. The publishers in that case anyway, were actively colluding in, were in fact probably in part responsible for James Frey's IMVHO fairly disgraceful web of damn liez. But I don't suppose anyone involved regrets a second of it, 600,000+ sales later.

14:38 / 31.01.06

Isn't it something like 3.5 million sales?

Apparently there are several class-action lawsuits being filed, suing for tens of millions of dollars in "damages" resulting from not only purchasing the book, but the time it took to read it, and the emotional trauma of finding out the book was a lie.

I read the report on thesmokinggun.com that originally blew the whistle on Frey, and it's true that he did make up some pretty despicable things in order to gain sympathy, and definitely repeated and perpetuated the lies when promoting the book. But holy shit, folks, get over it. I refuse to believe that out of the 3.5 million people that read that book, any more than a tiny handful of them will have suffered any kind of lasting emotional injury over finding out a story they were told by a man they've never met turned out to be embellished.

Interestingly, despite ripping into Frey and humiliating him on national tv, Oprah has NOT removed the book from Oprah's Book Club (I guess it's too much of a pain in the ass to go and remove all those little stickers) - in fact I'd be surprised if sales didn't shoot up after this storm-in-a-teacup, so they'll all still benefit from it.

14:47 / 31.01.06

I've done some fact-checking in my time (fortunately, for a book which is never likely to see the inside of a bookshop or an Amazon package). My experience leads me to think that publishers probably can't afford to have books properly fact-checked (that is, assessing a books for factual accuracy) as it is excessively time-consuming when done rigorously. I found that I was able in most cases to identify the source for a particular factual statement, but that it was often very hard to find out how far that source itself was accepted. I have to admit that I did most of my fact-checking on the web - I wasn't given enough time to go and do the job in a library. Would guess that this is quite common with less well-resourced publishers...

Mind you - this book was a very general work; it might be easier to do it for something more specialist, where the corpus of source material is relatively more limited, and more specialist checkers could be employed. Most of the books I use are academic historical monographs, which are obsessively picked over not only by their authors and publishers, but also by eagle-eyed reviewers eager to spot any errors, so it's easy to be relatively confident that any inaccuracy will be picked up.

14:50 / 31.01.06

Although I do hope (sorry to go about this, but his behaviour has been intensely annoying,) that James Frey can't leave the house these days without being laughed at by pensioners, small children, dogs and so on. All that grindingly pretentious stuff in his interviews about 'the beauty of the truth' etc, was hard enough to swallow when it seemed to be based in reality, but now... I don't honestly know how he can look in the mirror, the clot. Quite apart from anything else, his book makes a mockery of anyone's genuine experiences in the Priory or related, which can't be easy, which, as somebody who's supposedly been there himself, James Frey ought to know very well. He seems to have made a very major category error, which is to assume that his, really a bit je-jeune, self-indulgence in drugs'n'booze automatically entitled him to a means to be saved, whatever he had to do, or say, to make this happen - Granted, it's worked, but even so...

16:55 / 31.01.06

i agree that the mistake was in the marketing of the book as truth, as well as frey's subsequent book campaign where he didnt even coyly try to pretend that some details were even exaggerated, much less invented.

i agree that the lawsuits are frivolous. ridiculous. laugable.

i read a review on this book that bashed it based on its prose and narrative style. it's not surprising that oprah picked such a title, more fluff than substance.

my worry is that the ubiquitous nature of the scandal will generate a genre of invented memoirs that are bad. we already have bad horror, bad science fiction, bad chicklit, etc., that have sprung from good versions of those categories being flung into the fray by greedy publishers and hack writers looking for a buck. and we already had fake memoirs, but they were good (or at least the popular ones were): kerouac, hemingway, huntersthompson, etc. we knew they were exaggerated, names were changed, at least, and there became a cult of fans who could respond to questions about how much was true - the degree of truth associated to each event along the timelines that the novels and reports followed the life of the authors. but they werent called "memoirs" even tho they were understood to be.

now we're going to have memoirs that are faked that are called fake, or with allusions to truth but accepted as fake, and this will become a popular genre. thats at least what i fear. i fear this compromises the literature of memoir AND of gonzo or exaggerated, fictionalized accounts.

but then again i fear anything associated with oprah is going to corrupt SOMETHING, so mine may not be the best opinion.

19:35 / 31.01.06

Were Hemmingway, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S Thompson's novels, for all they were largely based on real life events, ever presented as non-fiction though? I could be wrong about this, but I'm not sure if they were. And wouldn't 'a fake memoir' be one of the ways you could define the term 'novel' in the first place?

What James Frey's done seems to be qualitatively different, insofar as he's gone on, in great detail, about his alleged pain in a situation that actually must be extremely unpleasant (I wouldn't have anything like as much of a problem with him if he'd been embellishingly wildly about, say, being a Dallas Cowboys fan,) and been so appallingly po-faced, and, frankly, such a wanker, about a set of circumstances that he had in fact made up. Given the lofty claims he was prone to making about teh hardcore honesty of his prose (with sales figures like those, there will probably, and sadly, be more books, but I'll be surprised if there's another interview,) it's really a source of amazement that he hasn't, as yet, just cashed in his chips, writing-wise anyway, out of sheer embarrassment.

And I do sort of think that Frey should be up in court for his tedious antics - If nothing else, I'll be following the proceedings with interest.

(With apologies, Sleaze, for derailing the thread a bit.)

19:50 / 31.01.06

no, you're right, thats exactly it, those books werent presented as nonfiction, except for thompsons' that is. but still, he didnt present them as actual fact.

i just dont think one can sue for lost time spent reading a book.

i think the editor is, however, at risk, i think it's the editor and publisher who choose to fact check or not fact check. probably in their rush to produce and market something like frey's as memoir, as true, because of the large market right now for those kinds of books, they took it for granted that the "facts" were true.

whereas in the past, most editors would have presumed that they should change names, at least, just for safety's sake.

if anyone has a valid reason to sue frey, it would be any characters identifiable as real people and misrepresented in the book. but not readers. the idea of readers suing the writer or the publisher makes me very uneasy.

19:52 / 31.01.06

i dont think i'd pay more for a "factchecked" book, unless it was an encyclopedia. as a student of literature, i may be more dubious about even direct claims made by an author, and as a writer, i know that even the retelling of actual events is often adjusted, particularly if the book reads like a novel. the truth is pretty boring.

23:09 / 31.01.06

If one thought A Million Little Pieces was 100% truth, then one is far too gullible. The book reads like a Hollywood screenplay:
One badass who has teh Fury - Check.
One blonde, blue-eyed beauty - Check.
The love between them is forbidden - Check.
One older, wiser, richer, and "connected" man to help the badass - Check.
Campbellian path - Check.
Mommy issues - Check.
teh Fury - Check.

To quote David Spade, I Ca-seen it when it was called Goodfellas.

The problem is not Frey. He originally sold it as a novel. The problem is not Oprah (she's getting people to read, good on her). The problem is the market is not willing to allow novels to enter. According to the guy who writes book reviews for AICN, Frank Bascombe, it is almost impossible to get a literary agent to represent a novel, let alone sell a novel to firms. It's much easier to call it fact and sell it as a memoir, something that always makes good numbers.

00:12 / 01.02.06

Before my grandson left home for the drugs clinic recently, he was quite fond of saying, after ten or so dark ales during family occasions - I don't suppose anyone really wants to go back over the events leading up to that incident at his cousin Mike's wedding, for example, I mean they really just don't - that it actually isn't all that difficult to get hold of a literary agent.

Good synopsis, nice opening letter, and fifty or sixty pages of half-decent book, was what he used to go on about, the little lad, as a definite 'in' - the problem, he'd continue, getting paler by the second, was how to translate any of this into either fame or hard cash.

15:33 / 01.02.06

as to what the problem is or may be, and the approach to truth as it relates to the oprah factor:

Article

12:34 / 02.02.06

Probably derailing this genuinely interesting thread entirely, but I’d have to agree about the slipperiness of literary agents; I’ve contacted many of them in the past few years, and the vast majority of them have responded with a form letter saying ‘not looking for anyone right now’, or – perhaps worse – have replied in personalised fashion, frequently spelling names or titles wrong, or in the case of Helen Fielding’s agent, thanking me for letting them read chapters which I hadn’t actually sent (explains how ‘The Edge of Reason’ got published, if nothing else). The rejection I can handle, but when I then read agents’ letters or interviews in The Bookseller, bleating about how they can’t find the next Rowling, I can’t help but wonder if the next big thing is actually in the stack of envelopes sitting ignored on the corner of their desk…

Anyway, about the Frey thing: It might set an interesting, if slightly dangerous precedent – though given the frontispage, I’d be interested to see if Dan Brown’s bestseller would also be subject to a class action…

The Onion, as ever, has a nice comment on the Frey revelation - here (hope that works).

17:24 / 03.02.06

If it's true that Frey originally pitched it as fiction, and it was the publishers, et al that suggested the change to memoir, because it wasn't good enough to seem like fiction, what does that say about either the quality of the book buying public, or of the writing, or both?

Not having read the book, and going from info gleaned on this thread that it was rejected as fiction, that seems to imply that apparantly we (the public) can accept sub-par usage of language only when we feel we are privy to someone's personal revelation. Much like reality tv, I guess.

Though it may be debateable, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Joyce, and so on, obviously used their lives for their work, yet also made it readable, and made it go beyond them. Besides all the lying about it being true afterwards, is it all bascially Frey's fault because he couldn't make it work as a novel?

(And as a tangent, would Oprah have originally stamped her seal of approval if it wasn't a true story? Did it capture her because it was a hard-luck sell, not because it was well written?)

02:27 / 04.02.06

Whatever publishers wanted, regardless of what any agent or procurer or reader ever suggested to him, Frey made that call to publish his book as nonfiction on his own.
Personally, I ascribe to the idea that you should publish pretty much anything that isn't just raw fact and analysis as fiction, even if it - as far as you're concerned - really happened. Don't call it nonfiction until everyone's dead and the statute of limitations are all passed. Something like that.
Of course, my mom put part of my life into her memoir, and as far as she's concerned it's purely nonfiction, but for me...
I do think in nonfiction, it's always best to presume things are being filtered. And anyone who's been through nearly any writing workshop is familiar with the coos and oohs for people who write one of those harrowing, struggle-stories of overcoming and horrible circumstances past... even when they're otherwise terribly written, overdone, annoying, leading and outright bad. Because the author is clearly so brave and kind and wonderful for telling their story. So, yeah, the 'it's true' apparently makes something super-quality to almost everyone. The rest of us just watch Julia Roberts and keep repeating 'but she's a whiny asshole through the whole - I don't give a damn if she's playing a real person and this thing is badly scripted!'

13:19 / 04.02.06

Thinking about it (which is admittedly a bit of strain these days,) I suppose the weird paradox of 'A Million Little Pieces' is that it might have worked perfectly well as fiction (it's not that badly-written, I mean it's ok,) if the events described weren't so unlikely. If teh luv interest was less attractive, if the 'godfather' was a bit sleazier, if 'Frey' himself was quite a lot more helpless, it could have made for an interesting, and publishable, novel, if he hadn't overdone it quite so much. Oddly though, it seems as if only by dressing the fantasy up as fact was he able to get the thing in print - Could this be a METAPHOR for the state of America in general these days, or what?!!11!23!

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

17:32 / 06.02.06

A Milion Little Pieces is a terribly written book. If Frey submitted it as a fictionalized account of his life, nobody would have gotten through the first 2 chapters before rejecting it. Claiming that it was the truth was the only way anyone would buy it, and it was all it had going for it.

"I got up. I got out of bed. I went to the bathroom door. It was closed. I opened it and stepped inside. It was cold. Very cold. Cold. I turned on the hot water to take a shower. The water was very hot. So hot. Burning. Skin burning. I take a shower to wash away the darkness from the night before. The darkness won't come off. So dark. So hot on the skin. Burning skin. My skin burns. And I am dark."

now, unless someone said "no, man, this really happened, this is his REAL LIFE" this reads like utter shit. Well, it reads that way anyway, but at least if it were true it would have some kind of meaning.

21:52 / 06.02.06

I enjoy the fact that Frey literally has this tattooed on his body:
"FTBSITTTD"
It means, "Fuck the bullshit, it's time to throw down."

While Frey's more rabid fans have this tattoo:
"Hold On"

Whisky Priestess

22:50 / 06.02.06

i just dont think one can sue for lost time spent reading a book.

More's the fucking pity, eh? Eh, Andrew Motion? Eh?

And wouldn't 'a fake memoir' be one of the ways you could define the term 'novel' in the first place?

Why indeed. Defoe did it first (and was arguably one of the fathers of the novel as we know it) - Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Journal of the Plague Year are all presented as "true life stories", memoirs of the travails of the first-person-narrating main characters. in my beginning is my end, the fic/fac snake eats its own tail etc.

01:23 / 07.02.06

TEC:

Yes, you're right - it's an odd thing to have rose-tinted memories of a book that seemed a bit silly in the first place, but the quoted extract... well it's worse than I recalled, let's put it that way.

07:41 / 07.02.06

I'm going to sue Elijah for the time lost reading that godawful extract. Jesus wept.

12:50 / 07.02.06

Why indeed. Defoe did it first (and was arguably one of the fathers of the novel as we know it) - Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Journal of the Plague Year are all presented as "true life stories", memoirs of the travails of the first-person-narrating main characters. in my beginning is my end, the fic/fac snake eats its own tail etc.

i think the critical difference that frey has introduced is the truth outside of the text. he didnt simply publish a book that called itself a true-life tale. he followed that up with a book tour, where he presented himself as a truthful author who had lived the experiences.

in many ways, this controversy does indeed expose the limited approach to literature that today's readers have, particularly those brought to books by such superficial figures as oprah. for them, subtlety, nuance, these are meaningless terms.

but i think this also extends to this writer. clearly, frey is not a greatly talented writer. his limited capacity for literary imagination, for artistic truth, might have caused him to feel he needed to portray the fictitious figure he created in the book.

i dont think that frey falls into the same category as writers who develop a story within the literary technique of using reality as a model. i think he's just someone who used the system to his own ends. his doesnt seem to be an artistic expression or even an artistic miscalculation. this seems to be something much, much less.

21:13 / 07.02.06

The closest to Frey I can think of, in terms of people buying in and it being absolutely fictionalized and sometimes wholly made up... That 'Mutant Message' thing, or some of the Carlos Castaneda books, but I don't know that those are meant to be believed as solid fact and history at any point. It's like the people that read Shaviro's 'Doom Patrols' and bypassed the part about it being 'fiction' and totally bought into, say, the Kathy Acker chapter as explicit fact. Which it wasn't.
On the other end would be things such as 'Magick Without Tears' or whatever it was introduced the Philadelphia Experiment and Carl Allen, that were/are ostensibly meant to be true and the author absolutely believes in them, or at least is willing to keep up a perpetual insistence that the material is honest.
Biographical writings that are highly, well, stretched and potentially unreal - 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' for example - tend to be published as fiction and treated as nonfiction, or put out as nonfiction with a wink and a nod towards the truth.

20:22 / 22.03.06

A lawsuit is certainly in order if a thing has been falsely advertised. It's not about the emotional distress, though I don't discount that, it's about having spent money on something falsely described. Having jerked around a lot of people's emotions would make him an asshole, it's getting money out of people under false pretenses that would make him a fraud.

If I buy a generic product labelled as a name brand I am entitled to sue, whether or not the generic is good, bad, whatever. Same thing.

02:59 / 23.03.06

More than that, this sort of thing would be akin to buying a box that says vegetarian and opening it to find the contents are beef processed into the shape and texture of peas and carrots, dyed and flavored. Or buying a pistol for protection and Dirty Harry spawned delusions, say, and when confronted by a mugger, you pull the trigger and send a volley of cold water his way while the gun goes beep beep beep before he stabs you and beats your corpse with the squirtgun before stealing your wallet, shoes, and dignity.

22:41 / 23.03.06

If I buy a generic product labelled as a name brand I am entitled to sue, whether or not the generic is good, bad, whatever. Same thing.

isn't it more like buying a carton of juice drink with pictures of oranges on the box to discover that no oranges were in fact harmed in the creation of the beverage in question and further discovering a small legal disclaimer that while not technically the juice of oranges the drink actually contains the extract of one...

18:38 / 24.03.06

I find the whole idea of a lawsuit a bit ridiculous. As DaveBCooper pointed out, there isn't anyone suing Dan Brown for all the "facts" in the Da Vinci code, which really are presented as facts that stand outside the fictional boundries of the novel. Brown's so called facts and things described in the Da Vinci code are either totally made up or taking interpretation to a whole new level.

Memoirs aren't non-fiction in the way an encyclopedia is. I've seen bookstores have On the Road in the memoirs section. It's a genre where you should know that there might be artistic freedoms and things get changed.

This isn't like buying something you think will be great and finding out it's not. It's like watching the news and discovering they're talking about the same things as they did the night before (and therefore not being news).

So, about non-fiction in general, I think you probably have to see non-fiction of several types. There are so many books (often about social issues like politics and not about things like beetles in the northern hemisphere) which are labeled non-fiction which contain biases, wrongly interpreted data, opinions presented as facts and so on, that fact-checking really won't do much good because of the nature of the book. And I really wouldn't pay more if it had a little lable on it saying that someone put time into trying to fact check things mentioned in the book.

I might do it for things where I would really require correct facts, like books containing pure statistical data, or an encyclopedia. I'd be glad if I knew things like that are checked before being printed.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

02:32 / 25.03.06

i think facts recorded in reference material held to account for the accuracy of the information, however, anything else...

we shouldn't take it all so seriously. How can one honestly use quotation marks when recording a conversation that happened over two-thirds of one's life ago?

aren't non-fiction (excluding reference) and fiction different means of sharing stories with one another? If so, what difference if I read a non-fictional account of a person who survived great adversity versus a fictional tale of a character who survives great adversity.

what difference to the reader (certainly there's a difference for the author)? If a reader never meets the author, then really, does it make a difference?

the whole notion of litigation is ridiculous

--NotJack

05:23 / 25.03.06

I'm not sure that people are asking the right questions.

I mean, lets face it, no one can write an objective autobiography or memoir. I think the only one that may have come close was Hollywood Animal and thats only because joe eszterhas has a terrible reputation and will never work in hollywood again because hes made so many enemies, he has nothing to lose.

But even then, most writers will back off on something for the sole reason that they aren't objective. They stil have friends and family they can lose and that keeps them from being able to see the truth.

I really they James Frey/Fry, the guy who wrote the fake memoir, was on to something when he said that he was looking for higher truths.