James Frey and the Factual Lie

Just a quick word on the James Frey imbroglio. On the one hand, wasn't this inevitable? In an age of memoir, haven't we all read something that made us think "Nope. Sorry. Too perfect. I call bullshit."? On the other, should we care? Is memoir supposed to be perfect nonfiction? Do we hold memoirists to the same standard as journalists (who we usually hold to a far lesser standard than historians, by the way)?

These questions have been floating all over the web lately, and since I am still punchy and since if you don't know the Frey story by now you probably didn't come to dcat for your first exposure to it, I am going to leave those issues to others to decide. But one of the aspects of this case that has gotten me thinking and that I have not seen any reference to ties to one of the deified trends of the historical profession: Oral history.

Try writing a book on a contemporary historical event, an event or era from which people still survive. And try to do so without conducting interviews. The odds are pretty good that you'll get hammered by critics and readers and editors. "Why didn't you conduct interviews?" I know this because it has happened to me in the process of writing and revising my Freedom Rides book. Two aspects of this are vexing: The first is that I do, in fact, use dozens, hundreds, of oral histories. I just did not conduct the interviews myself. Given that over the past few decades groups, organizations and individuals have done the interviews, and that they conducted and transcribed their conversations in closer chronological proximity to the Freedom Rides than in the years after 2000, why should I not respect the work of those interviewers and the words of the interviewees? The second aspect of this supposed critique that is bothersome relates to a general problem I have with criticisms of sources -- if someone has written a book or an article, they should get the benefit of the doubt with their sources unless they have clearly misused them. The absence of interviews of particupants by the author is not itself a problem. If you think it is, you need to explain why. The burden of proof, in effect, is on the person asserting the problem of absence.

So what does this have to do with Frey? To my mind, a great deal. Not to put too fine a point on it, but lots of people are full of shit. Not intentionally so, maybe, and after 30, 40, 50 years, the memory does play tricks. But despite my lack of formal interviews I have talked to dozens of Freedom Riders informally. I have exchanged emails with many others. I have seen too many muddled memories, too many people telling stories that happened to other people, too many people who thought of themselves as the Zelig of the 1960s. Many of them have told the same stories so many times they they are honed as tales but cease to work as history. And of course many of them have simply told the stories before and I can find their tellings in a collewction or in one of a dozen relevant archives. Who am I to ignore those sources?

And beyond my current work, I have run into far too many people of a certain age who after hearing that I am a historian have patronizingly said things to me like "You want to know real history? I can tell you the real history." (This person is usually the most full of shit and self-aggrandizing of all). Almost every young historian deals with this.

(Side note -- having lived through something does not make you an expert on it. Just because I have fallen down and thus experienced the wonders of gravity doesn't make me a fucking physicist. Catching the clap doesn't make you a microbiologist. And being a carbon based life form in a particular era doesn't mean you have any particular expertise about it. Most people don't have a clue about current affairs, culture, or the world around them. Why would we assume that twenty years from now they become retroactive experts?)

James Frey wrote a book that people liked that was supposed to be based on his own experiences. Now we find that his pants are on fire and that they may well be hanging off the telephone wire. He manipulated his memories under the guise of fact to make his story more compelling. People lie all the time, and doing so after the fact about their involvement in an event seems like the most common form. That, coupled with the fact that memory is fallible and the passing of time makes it ever more so, is at the heart of why some of us are not as smitten with oral history as others are. Oral history can be a wonderful source. But it is a source best used for texture and used with a critical eye. And despite what some believe, it is not the best source in most cases, nor is it the end all and be all of writing good history with an eye toward finding truths.