The Running With Scissors lawsuit has been settled. Augusten Burroughs' adoptive family wanted the memoir of his ghastly adolescence reclassified as fiction. The compromise? It's a "book". Pity the American shelving clerks. Pity the American readers, too, if timidity can slam the door on that most deliciously ambiguous of genres, the memoir.
The Turcottes had a right to challenge his account. The charges were serious - Polanskiesque sexual ethics and Withnailian housekeeping - and the pseudonyms paper-thin. But in an earlier era they might have sued for retractions, reprints, or removal of the book from shelves. Instead, they wanted damages (and when you sue a writer for $2m, that's a cut of the gross) and a different section of the bookshop. The worrying idea was that there was a second principle at stake. Not only did he misrepresent individuals, it is suggested, he cheated the public.
Apparently, you no longer have to be named to be the victim of a book. James Frey limited defamation to associates who were dead, imaginary, or both. This nicety cut no ice with Oprah viewers. Writing of the journey to hell and back without actually having been to hell and back (at least in the way he described) was a betrayal, they said, of the millions of readers inspired by his tale of redemption. Also, it was a consumer protection issue. Purchasers of the book A Million Little Pieces were misled by the marketing of the book as a 'memoir/literature'" explains the class action settlement, and "they would not have purchased the book had they known ... that certain facts in the book had been altered and that incidents had been embellished."
Have we really lost our taste for subjective truth? I don't for a second think that either lawsuit speaks to the typical American bookbuyer - much more to the taste for literary litigation. The books haven't changed. Unfortunately, penalties (up to $2.35m for the Frey debacle) speak more loudly than common sense. The safe option is for publishers to place anything unverifiable in fiction, as they commonly do in France and Germany. It sounds like a small concession. For an author, perhaps it is small. The reader, however, pays a high price for that safety. In a memoir, risk is the whole point.
Reading memoirs leaves you exposed. It's a game, sparring with the author: you think you can take me for a ride? Self-invention bleeds into malice and honest mistakes. Novels can seem awfully low-stakes by comparison. What's the truth? Whatever the author says it is. Memoirs will get away with whatever they can. It's meeting a stranger in a bar and choosing, at least for a while, to swallow his line. The same story in a novel is being fixed up on a date by your aunt. And if you decide, like Oprah's audience, to find a spiritual guide there, it's a case of caveat emptor.
Do you care whether it says "memoir" or "fiction" on the spine? If so, stay here. The US is going in the wrong direction, but I see hope for the UK. Britain is refreshingly cynical. Libel is pursued as libel, and no one yet is suing to defend the nation from memoir-peddling heroes; no one yet has seen the need. You can choke on hypocrisy - and maybe manufactured outrage - but not a grain of salt.
