I'm fascinated by memoirs lately, as I'm reading Running with Scissors. In my quest to find out the name of the mother in real life, I found an NPR interview with Margaret Robison, Burroughs' mother, which certainly calls the veracity of the story into question. Following the lead on the lawsuit brought by the family he stayed with, I found this interesting Vanity Fair interview with the family.
All of this has me pondering the issue of memoir and point of view. Certainly, I understand the anger on the part of those who are portrayed as being horrible in the book, but as D and I were discussing last night, everyone sees things differently. With memory and point of view and people being human and all, it's quite possible the version Burroughs gives is accurate to him. Goodness knows that anytime you sit with family members or friends and talk about your different versions of the same events, that you are likely to walk away from that discussion thinking someone is a little off their cake, since the version they told makes no sense what-so-ever.
This all comes at a time where I'm explaining to students that first person point of view in literature does not make the work autobiographical by default and at a time where in my own fiction writing I'm considering shifting from third person to first person. We all write from our own experience on some level, but I'm still rather horrified and fascinated by writers like Burroughs and even Frey who seem to present these dysfunctional, very much embellished versions of their earlier lives as factual accounts, rather than publishing them as fiction. Burroughs has rightly said that the story is "his story" rather than that of the others involved, and I get that, but I still find it disturbing that it is presented as factual. I suppose part of what I'm struggling with is this sense of "if I say it's true and I make it incredible, folks will buy my books." I'm also wondering what incidents like this do to the teaching of literature--if a work that is largely embellished and fictionalized can be a memoir, that certainly indicates a fluidity of genres and a challenge to things like intentional fallacy and so on.
I'm curious what other folks think about faux memoirs that don't seem to take into account collateral damage.
1 Comment
Angel
4/14/2009 02:34:23 am
PS: The lawsuit was settled, and Burroughs' publisher removed the word "memoir:" http://www.pw.org/content/turcotte_family_settles_burroughs_st_martin039s_running_scissors_suit
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