Prompt:
For our prompt this week, I want you to think about fake memoirs, author mills (James Patterson), and celebrity inspired book clubs. Basically write a readers' response to one of the articles you are reading for this week (see syllabus or links in this post for readings) - or talk about a time when a book or author that made headlines affected you personally or your work.
For our prompt this week, I want you to think about fake memoirs, author mills (James Patterson), and celebrity inspired book clubs. Basically write a readers' response to one of the articles you are reading for this week (see syllabus or links in this post for readings) - or talk about a time when a book or author that made headlines affected you personally or your work.
Article Referenced:
Somers, J. (2017, December 18). 5 Hoax Memoirs
Still Worth Reading. B&N Reads. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/5-hoax-memoirs-still-worth-reading/
The hoax memoir is a topic of
interest for me after a discussion that my book club had last year. We read the memoir Maid by Stephanie Land
and it led to one of the most thought-provoking discussions that our group has
had to date. Several members of our book
club felt after reading the book that Land was an unreliable narrator given how
many people in her life seemed to disagree with her perspective on various situations
throughout the book. I didn’t share that same interpretation, but instead
thought Land was a person who had made a series of bad decisions at a
relatively young age then felt she didn’t deserve better because of her past mistakes
and thus would sabotage any chances she had of making her life better.
After reading about the hoax memoirs
featured in our assignment this week, I reflected back on the discussion about Maid
and how it might compare to the hoax memoirs outlined. I especially looked at the parallels between Maid
and A Million Little Pieces. Assuming my fellow book club members were
right and that Land embellished her story in a similar way that Frey did by
exaggerating the most important details in her story, there is a still a great narrative
to tell about the difficulty of raising oneself up out of poverty. The stories in Land’s book detail the
difficulties of obtaining government assistance when you’re a single parent in
a low-paying job and the traps people fall into as they try to become
self-sufficient. As someone who has
worked adjacent to many social service agencies helping people such as Land, I
know the truths in her story and recognized that she suffered many of the struggles
common to individuals working with social service agencies around me. Much like Frey’s story, it seems there is a
lot of valuable perspective to be found in Land’s story even if some of the
story may have been fabricated to sell books.
Thinking about the decision
to publish Land’s story from a pragmatic view, how does a publisher verify the account
of a story when dealing with perspectives rather than facts? Land’s story is primarily her own
recollections which of course are tainted by her own perceptions of people and
events.
Given the nature of memoirs,
I think all readers would be best served by approaching the genre in general as
the author’s interpretation of how events unfolded and not as a piece of
journalism. Each of our memories has
faults in it, and thus any story told based on our memories is likely to have factual
errors. While publishers still should have the onus of
verifying a story as much as possible prior to publication, the fact of the
matter is that readers should use caution before taking any memoir at face
value and should always remember that a memoir is but one version of a story.
