Are JT LeRoy and James Frey Fakes?
Monday, January 09, 2006
I'll admit I'm not up on either of these controversial authors, however Yahoo has a great story about how JT LeRoy and James Frey as not who they say they are. In LeRoy's case, not even the same sex. Both authors have claimed to write their popular works based on their own life experiences, which now appears to be partially, or wholly, a lie. A New York Times articles claims that JT LeRoy is a middle aged woman, not transgerred gay man he claims to be. In talking about James Frey the Yahoo articles reads:
On Sunday, the popular investigative website, TheSmokingGun.com, published an article titled "A Million Little Lies" that followed a six-week examination of police and court records, as well as interviews with law enforcement personnel.
The verdict of the website was that Frey had "wholly fabricated or wildly embellished" numerous details of his outlaw past, including a three-month spell behind bars and the death of a teenage girl.
James Frey's A Million Little Lies was one of the Oprah book club books.
On Sunday, the popular investigative website, TheSmokingGun.com, published an article titled "A Million Little Lies" that followed a six-week examination of police and court records, as well as interviews with law enforcement personnel.
The verdict of the website was that Frey had "wholly fabricated or wildly embellished" numerous details of his outlaw past, including a three-month spell behind bars and the death of a teenage girl.
James Frey's A Million Little Lies was one of the Oprah book club books.
1 Comments:
From author/blogger Ron Franscell at http://underthenews.blogspot.com ...
American literature -- considered an oxymoron in the rest of the world -- has gone downhill fast since New York surrendered America's storytelling standards to Hollywood, where illusion -- EVEN IN TRUE STORIES -- is exactly the point. Today, the "perfect" story is determined by its film-worthiness more than its literary quality. In the name of creating Californicated literature, New York editors have blurred the line until even they don't know what's true. "It's a good story," they'll say, "so who cares if it's an utter and ballsy lie?"
I care. Capote admitted on the bookjacket that "In Cold Blood" was fictionalized in some part. Coleridge's definition of fiction was "the willing suspension of disbelief." What if it's not willing? That's the difference between making love and rape, albeit without either the exhilaration or violence. If you thought you were reading a true story, you were conned. What if we found out next week that the famous Zapruder film was, in fact, a Hollywood dramatization passed off as a hyper-realistic eyewitness home-movie and you shoulda seen the look on your face and, oh, isn't it funny how we fooled you??
This is the literary equivalent of Reality TV. They tell you what you're seeing is real, but it's not real at all. It's simulated reality, edited into convenient 30-minute bytes ... and we eat it up.
In America today, we live with too much fiction posing as fact. Blogs, books, politics, TV, videogaming, movies -- and some would say, even the news -- thrive on it. But it's not art to swear you're telling the truth and then fib. That's just common lying. The artful trick is to tell me you're lying and make me believe every word is true.
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