Synthetic Memoir Is Not the New Virtual Reality
by Josh Livingston

Buffeted by scandal after scandal, the publishing industry is in a major crisis of confidence. Every time I turn around there’s another author caught embellishing, exaggerating or inventing outright significant portions of a memoir.

Personally, I pin the blame on Sedaris.

I’m not saying that David Sedaris is a literary Lie Fairy leaving fabrications under blocked autobiographer’s pillows (although he’d look pretty amusing in a tutu). But I believe his consistent bestseller status promotes ever more sensational personal revelations in today’s (ostensible) nonfiction.

He’s built an enviable career with essays about the odd family circumstances of his upbringing that brook no vanity. According to his own words, Sedaris is weak, lying, totally unemployable, terrified of confrontation and a champion perspirer. His confessional essays showcase the kind of personal failings and minor humiliations that most people do their best to gloss over and forget. The spoonful of sugar that makes the mortification go down is his impish, self-mocking tone.

His near-unanimous critical and popular success — to the tune of some 3 million copies — has sent a clear message to aspiring authors: “Do what I do and succeed.”

Augusten Burroughs listened. His breakthrough autobiography is clearly influenced by Sedaris and glibly mines the same angst of an unusual adolescence. However, the dysfunction in Running with Scissors surpasses mere quirk. The author ups the exhibitionist ante by baring a youth marked by complete parental abdication and sexual abuse. Sedaris’s embarrassing Greek grandma and facial tics are wholesome co-eds from 60s era Playboy; Burrough’s scat-decoding psychotherapist and electro-shock playtime are 70s Hustler honeys flashing some pink for easy cash.

Here, too, the line between fact and fiction begins to blur. Sedaris tacitly admits exaggerating elements in his recounting for laughs; Burroughs settled a lawsuit filed by the family portrayed in Running with Scissors. For $2 million, he maintained the right to call the book a “memoir.”

By his next autobiography, Burroughs is a raging alcoholic plummeting toward rock bottom. The text exposes his dark, selfish, emotionally-stunted past including withdrawal-induced hallucinations, an AIDS-stricken lover and harsh realities of rehab. That would be hard to top, but underestimating the creativity of ambitious writers is a mistake. Hence the million little exaggerations in James Frey’s account of multi-substance addiction, jail time and suicidal girlfriends or JT Leroy’s (thankfully) fictional autobiography of an abused child-cum-truckstop prostitute.

Just last month, the gig was up for Margaret B. Jones, whose recent memoir Love and Consequences describes her supposed life running drugs for gangbangers and losing a foster brother to a drive-by shooting (despite being a white girl from the right side of the tracks). More reprehensible is Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. The author details her flight from Nazis and being raised by a pack of wolves. No, you’re not sniffing glue. Nazis and wolves.

These recently uncovered phonies are baffling. Did they think no one would notice? And why not just publish them as fiction? Readers want to feel like they’ve been told a story, not just a line.

Long Story Short runs every other Tuesday. Sketch of Augusten Burroughs by Luis Colan.

more about Josh Livingston