Based on a True Story

BY Jackie Wykes

Literature has had its fakers for a long time. From 18th century poet Thomas Chatterton writing poetry as a medieval monk, to the Ern Malley affair, to Helen Darville/Demidenko, to Norma Khouri, fake authors, false identities, exaggerations and literary lies abound. Early 2006 revealed two more fake authors – one who had faked significant aspects of his memoir, and another who was entirely fake. I am, of course, talking about James Frey and JT LeRoy.

The scandals involving Frey and LeRoy have more in common than the timing of their exposure as fakes. Both authors achieved cult status and commercial success. Both tell stories of desperation and redemption. Both were lauded for their “brutal honesty”. Both had supposedly lived the lives (or close to) they wrote about. In both cases, it is the ‘realness’ of the author’s lives which has been the source of controversy, and has raised questions about truth, authenticity, the boundary between fact and fiction, and the current popularity of ‘real life’ stories.

LeRoy’s first novel, Sarah (Bloomsbury, 2000), about a young, cross-dressing truckstop whore and his mother, bore a remarkable resemblance to LeRoy’s own story of childhood abuse, prostitution, and drug addiction. His second book, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (Bloomsbury, 2001), is a collection of short stories again supposedly based on his early life, and written as a part of therapy. Even though both books were officially fiction, they were positioned as thinly veiled autobiography, and were read as authentic accounts of a tragic life. So what did it mean when the ‘real life’ on which they were based was revealed to be a fiction itself?

On 17 October 2005, New York Magazine ran Stephen Beachy’s now famous story claiming JT LeRoy didn’t exist. Beachy claimed that LeRoy’s books were not in fact written by an abused, transgender, HIV positive, teenage former whore, but by a middle-aged woman named Laura Albert. Albert would neither confirm not deny that she was the author of the LeRoy books, but in the weeks the followed Beachy’s article, Albert’s former partner, Geoffrey Knoop, confirmed the accusation.

The scandal of JT LeRoy was not simply that Albert had published under a nom de plume, but that the power and popularity of LeRoy’s work was derived from its supposed authenticity. Although a novel about a boy prostitute written by a middle-aged woman is a far more impressive feat of imagination than one written by a former boy prostitute, it was never (knowingly) the author’s imagination which made the story compelling; it was knowing it was ‘real’.

James Frey’s bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces (Random House, 2003), is a slightly different case. For one thing, Frey really does exist. And he has, in fact, been an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal, as his memoir claims. In publishing his book as memoir, an explicitly non-fiction form, Frey’s work also makes different truth-claims to LeRoy’s. Interestingly, the manuscript was originally offered as an ‘autobiographical novel’, but after being rejected by 17 different publishers Frey recast it as memoir. As a fictionalised story of addiction and recovery, no one would publish it, but with the legitimacy of a ‘true story’, it became a bestseller.

Pieces was already a cult hit when Oprah hailed Frey’s tale of desperation and redemption as ‘inspirational’ and selected it for her influential book club in September 2005. With this endorsement, Frey’s book shot to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there. In the three months following its selection, Pieces outsold every book save Harry Potter. Such massive success, of course, attracted attention.

On 8 January 2006, The Smoking Gun published a report claiming that substantial portions of Frey’s memoir were either massively exaggerated or purely fabricated. For example, the three-month gaol term detailed in the book turned out to be in reality no more than a few hours held at a local police station. While Frey denied the accusations at first, he later admitted to having “embellished in the book for obvious dramatic reasons”. Which would be fine for an autobiographical novel (say, LeRoy’s Sarah), but not so much when you’re selling millions of copies by going on Oprah and claiming that it’s all true.

When Frey’s ‘embellishments’ were first revealed, Oprah stood by her author saying “the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me, and I know it still resonates with millions of other people who will read this book.” She later retracted this, saying “I left the impression that the truth does not matter, and I am deeply sorry about that, that is not what I believe.” Her statements raise some interesting questions about truth, reality, and authenticity.

For example, if the “underlying message” of Frey’s work didn’t depend on the story being real, then why not publish it as fiction? And if the LeRoy books sold as fiction, why invent the persona to make them seem real? What is it about real pain, real desperation, real despair that is so appealing?

Is it a desire for authenticity in a time when old sources for ‘truth’, such as the news, are often little more than hype and spin? Are we looking for information? Is it voyeurism? Sensationalism? A safe way of indulging our own fantasies of excess? Is it perhaps schadenfreude, taking pleasure in others’ misfortune? Or the recognition of our own pain and vulnerability in someone else?

These things are also offered by fiction, which tells lies in order to tell another level of truth. It seems to me the truth we look for in autobiographical forms is not just the factual truth, but the truth of a person’s experience. The truth-claim is not so much ‘this really happened’ as ‘I really experienced this’, and if that truth is revealed as fiction, we feel as though we’ve been lied to by somebody we trusted.