Lying Liars and the Nation who loves them
In 2006, when publishing company Farrar Strauss and Giroux unleashed the marketing juggernaut behind The Mystery Guest, George Bouillier’s memoir became the first book to be published including a live action trailer as part of its marketing strategy. Flash animation paired with rock music had become common as publishing houses adapted to internet advertising, but never before had a book been sold using actors, directors, and best boys alongside the usual jacket blurbs and book tours.What’s amusing is that Bouillier’s book is not some action-packed, Dan Brown mud flap, or similar airport snoozer. It’s a lean 120-page memoir of a lost lover’s return, told with heavy French irony, which has drawn comparisons to Woody Allen’s films from
What’s more amusing is that it’s a memoir, published in 2006, that doesn’t stink of its genre or of the times, to put it lightly.
2006 saw the unraveling of James Frey, one of America’s most popular memoirists, the threads of unraveling of Augusten Burroughs, another famous memoirist, as well as the plagiarism trial of critically acclaimed author Ian McEwan and the dirty dismantling of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard text stealer.
The Mystery Guest is refreshingly void of reckless drug use and tortured suppressed childhoods. No hardscrabble coming-of-age saga. No over-sentimentalized tragedy. It contains none of the sad-sackery that has become synonymous with the memoir. Just some 40-year-old French guy writing self obsessively about broken hearts, fate, books he likes, and wine. The Mystery Guest even has a moral. And it’s also relevant and important - trust me.
“I wanted to be a writer that had an impact,” he told The Guardian’s Laura Barton last fall. “I wanted, and still [want], I want to write books that change people’s lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I [want to] write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.”
His heroes are the tough American male writer archetypes. Miller, Hemingway, and Kerouac- writers whose wild, macho histories go a long way toward explaining the main fallacy in Frey’s memoir. The auto collision and subsequent cop brawl that his book is famous for is a far cry from being arrested for drunk driving and released the same night on a $750 bond. Surely, he felt the need to beef up his tale to mirror his mentors. Unfortunately, his mentors had the good luck of publishing their work as fiction.
As far as he’s concerned, Frey is a victim of marketing, which is also where the book’s publisher, Doubleday, and Frey part ways: “I remember somebody at the publishing company told me that if the book’s 85% true there’s no problem,” he told The Guardian. Frey’s statement that his text was originally conceived as a work of fiction and that once contracts were signed and selling copies became the issue, the text became formatted as a memoir, is not corroborated by Doubleday. As far as they‘re concerned, they got duped just like Oprah. Without being able to sit down with Frey and attempt to measure his authenticity, I want to side with the guy on this one. Can you imagine him saying, “Hey, behemoth publishing company, let’s pretend all this stuff is real so that we can sell more copies.” You only have to turn on the television, watch “Survivor,” or the minute-by-minute live courtroom sagas to figure this one out. Readers and watchers are buying non-fiction by the ton.
Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs’ melo-memoir of his teen years, is probably the most popular memoir of the past decade. Its reputation is cemented rather infamously by the recent
And while Burroughs has yet to draw the true ire of the press, his work is facing increased scrutiny. One New York Times reviewer quipped that he was one reporter away from being the next Frey. But the inquiry into Running with Scissors is decidedly more legal than Oprah-atic in nature.
Burroughs’ adoptive family, who comprise a substantial part of his story, banded together, filed a lawsuit, and told their side of the story to Vanity Fair. The suit, according to the article published this past January, states that “Burroughs and St. Martins (the publisher) intentionally fictionalized the portrait of the family to make the book more sensational and therefore more marketable” and that “the author, with the full complicity of the publisher, literally has fabricated events that never happened and manufactured conversations that never occurred.”
All allegations have been denied by Burroughs and St. Martins, and no official comment has been made; but Burroughs, in a separate Vanity Fair article, said “this is my story…it’s not my mother’s story and it’s not the family’s story, they may remember things differently.” It seems Burroughs decided against informing his subjects that he was writing a book about them, as is the protocol of many memoirists.
Now, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I’ve got a feeling that a confession will be forthcoming from Mr. Burroughs. Just a guess. Times are getting tough for writers and storytellers. As audiences demand realistic blood-curdling drama en masse, their requirements of authenticity for said bloodshed is becoming stricter; it follows that the punishment for failure to meet those requirements will also be ugly. In the above mentioned Vanity Fair article, Buzz Bissinger wrote “the more shocking it is, the more sensational it is, the greater the prospect of fame and fortune.” Honestly, I had kind of hoped that the written world would’ve been spared from this kind of Hollywood-style competition.
How sensitive to lying are we? As a country, we’ve always been picky. Watergate and Iran-Contra were both episodes of fraud that neatly finished with pardons. President Clinton’s lies cost millions in lawyer’s fees footed by the general public. Bush Junior’s fallacies require advanced algebra to calculate their costs. We are so imbedded in the “truthiness” of our political leaders, and more so our celebrities, that adding another smokeless gun to the pile is something we just can’t handle and, perhaps, as Laura Barton wrote, “our recent desire for facts is an indication that we are recoiling from a culture that has grown increasingly synthetic.”
We are demanding that storytellers follow the same rules as journalists. And while I would love to point the finger at some lying politician for betraying our trust, as much as I want to point to 9-11 and say that this is all a result of our national fears - it’s easier to just chalk it up to money.
Writing about plagiarism for The New York Times, Charles Isherwood posited that our obsession with truth and originality is a symptom of viewing ideas as hard currency. “[It’s a] shift in cultural attitudes toward the meaning and uses of personal experience,” he wrote. “We are living in an age marked by a heightened sensitivity to the idea of one’s own life, and one’s own words, as a commodity with prospective commercial value.” Guy Debord may want to rephrase: “the Society of the Saleable Spectacle.”
The long lines of Americans ready to debase themselves on national television are indicative of Isherwood’s thoughts, even though he was talking about a higher art. Memoirs, journalism, blogging, mud wrestling, television, and war - we’ve all just got to get paid, right.
“Just when you think you’ve thought of everything,” Gregoire Bouillier writes in The Mystery Guest. “You forget the book sitting right there on your bedside table.”
That’s how Bouillier came into my life. Specifically, how Bouillier became important in my life. As 2006 turned muddier and the muck thickened into something sure to carry over well into 2007, this slim tale of love and literature offered more hope and promise than I could have ever asked for.
The day after Michel Leiris, Bouillier’s friend and mentor, passes away; Bouillier receives a call from an ex-girlfriend inviting him to a party. The circumstances of their breakup had always bothered him and this from the blue call, coinciding with Leiris’ death, seemed reason enough for Bouillier to give the party a shot.
The party is a bust: lots of snooty Parisian performance artists and hangers on, his ex barely acknowledged him. As he grabs his coat lying near a bouquet of flowers and his exit, she comes up behind him and says “roses are the only flowers I can bare to see cut.” Frustrated, Bouillier bolts. But by the time he gets home, he’s been awakened to the meaning hiding in her words. He searches his apartment frantically for the right book - it’s here somewhere, the old copy of Mrs. Dalloway she lent him so many years ago. There it is, piled near his bed. He flips through the text and finds the line “roses are the only flowers I can bare to see cut.” Virginia Woolf, his ex’s favorite author, had written them much earlier that century, and here they were cleaning up a messy break-up and heartache.
“Certain books can find their way into our lives and literally help bring them to fruition,” Bouillier told Yann Nicol in an interview for Villa Gillet. In his book, Bouillier explains his love affair in relation to Virginia Woolf’s novel and how it had affected his ex’s life down to her amorous decision-making. “What I’m trying to say is that literature has a use,” he continues in Yann Nicol’s interview. “Books don’t just have a market value. They’re not just a good way to kill an hour.”
Bouillier believes that truth and fiction are intertwined. Rather than just being stranger than each other, they influence each other in larger ways than we are willing to accept. We like our stories to be massaged by facts, but Americans are asking that even “truthy” fact-based work, such as memoirs, be held to a severe accountability like our politicians.
We have two American writers accused of fraud: James Frey has been cold-cocked because he fudged the edges of his life, sold it to us as truth, and when we found out he wasn’t completely forthcoming, we strung him up. Burroughs gave us a tale of his debauched, bad luck childhood; he correctly read our society’s desires, wrote a dirty story for us that wasn’t very factual, and soon, he might be hanging from those same gallows.
But we shouldn’t be so shocked at their lying because we asked for it. We like hearing about other peoples’ suffering: their drug use, their sex lives, and their childhoods. Each story must be increasingly filthy; it was only a matter of time before entertainers started faking it for money - hell, even sweet little Frenchman Bouillier. He made an overly sarcastic book trailer, a bland marketing ploy, assigning visuals to his work before the public even had a chance to read it, sensationalizing his tiny tome into a super modern commercial of pronounced French noses and cigarette smoke. But I forgive him.
“If there is a mystery, it’s that people write books and other people read them,” he told Yann Nicol. And that’s the simplicity we are losing; that journalism, novels, stories, and even television and film exist to serve not the greater good, just a good. I didn’t like his story, don’t like his style, his “truths,” but I have to agree with Augusten Burroughs when he emphasizes that “it’s [his] story.” And to call James Frey a fraud is to call yourself one as well. At least he publicly announced his flaws, emasculated himself to the nation at large.
Michel Leiris, Bouillier’s mentor, said that writing must “illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others.” And I agree, especially when we allow our creative types to fudge their work a little and wink while they do it.
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