Unethical writers love the power of creative non-fiction

Jan. 13--Creative non-fiction is an odd literary animal in which a writer uses a novelist's techniques to bring vivid life to a story that's true and accurate.

At least, it's supposed to be true and accurate.

But, as the controversy over "A Million Little Pieces" -- James Frey's Oprah-endorsed, best-selling memoir on substance abuse -- shows, what's portrayed as fact sometimes turns out to be fancy.

In his book, published in hardcover by Doubleday in 2003 and in paperback by Anchor in 2004, Frey described himself as an alcoholic, addict and criminal wanted in three states. Already a moneymaker, the book became a mega-seller last fall when Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club and described it on television as "a gut-wrenching memoir that is raw, and it's so real."

Like many other creative non-fiction books, whether works of memoir or history, "A Million Little Pieces" has the flow and impact of a novel. It features crisp, clipped dialogue (without quotation marks), intense descriptions and self-conscious literary pyrotechnics.

But, Oprah to the contrary, a lot of it apparently isn't real.

On Sunday, the online publication www.thesmokinggun.com published a lengthy article detailing its investigation into Frey's claims, which found that he "demonstrably fabricated key parts of [his] book" and "wholly fabricated or wildly embellished his purported criminal career." Tribune interviews with police in St. Joseph, Mich., supported the Web site's allegations.

For example, in his book, Frey claimed to have helped a high school friend sneak out with her boyfriend on the night she died in a car wreck. But, according to thesmokinggun.com, police reports and the girl's family indicate Frey had nothing to do with the tragedy.

Creative non-fiction is a "fuzzy genre" that's often abused by unethical writers, says Samuel G. Freedman, an author of five non-fiction books and a journalism professor at Columbia University. "These writers," he says, "want the power of non-fiction -- saying to the reader, 'This is true' -- but they also want the ability to invent."

The implied contract between publishers and readers is that a memoir and any other non-fiction book for sale is an account of actual people and events. The creative part of creative non-fiction comes in the storytelling techniques that a writer uses to give the story color and punch.

But, when it comes to violating that contract, Frey is far from an isolated case.

In 2003, highly respected author Vivian Gornick startled a roomful of writers and journalists by saying she invented one scene in her 1987 memoir "Fierce Attachments" and used composite characters in some Village Voice articles. Two decades earlier, Lillian Hellman was accused of making up the story of a personal friend killed in Nazi Germany, an account that became the basis for the hit movie "Julia."

At the University of California at Irvine, Barry Siegel, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, is teaching a course on the ethics of literary non-fiction, another term for creative non-fiction. The key to doing it right, he says, is hard-nosed, painstaking reporting: "We send people out to be reporters and come back and tell non-fiction stories."

That's echoed by Lee Gutkind, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, credited as the founder of the creative non-fiction movement. "There's this research aspect of creative non-fiction that you can't get away from -- that a lot of writers try to skip over or do without."

How many? Well, Gutkind also is the editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, and he estimates that at least one in every 10 manuscripts received is clearly fiction masquerading as non-fiction. He also says that 4 of every 10 need to be looked at carefully.

Over the past decade, memoirs have been the most visible and most moneymaking version of creative non-fiction on bookstore shelves. Yet, Joyce Johnson, author of two memoirs, "Missing Men" and "Minor Characters," says, "Book publishers do much less fact-checking than magazines do . . . and books stay around longer. They basically trust the author." In other words, they take the author's word that what's in a non-fiction book is actually not fiction.

Officials at major publishers have been declining to comment on the questions raised by the alleged inventions in the Frey book. But one, speaking on the condition of anonymity, argues that it's not the publisher's fault if a non-fiction book turns out to be tainted by fabrications.

"At our various publishing houses," the official said, "the author, not the editor, has the final say about the text of the work. That's very different from a newspaper or a magazine where the editors, not the journalist, have the final word."

Johnson notes that, by their nature, memories are "fragmentary, piercing details." She says, "I always get suspicious when I read a memoir with whole played-out scenes, full of dialogue."

Nonetheless, there are some liberties she thinks writers can take with the truth, such as changing the names of people to avoid embarrassment or legal action. "In a good literary memoir, you're basically rendering the essence of the experience," Johnson says. "Whether someone is called Jane or Susan, who cares?"

Gutkind does.

He says that any fictionalization raises questions about the rest of the text. For example, when an author includes a note indicating that some names and locations have been changed, Gutkind says, "that should put up a red flag right away."

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