Legendary Authors

A Fake Autobiography in the Daily Mail

“Top white author admits she made up story of growing up with tough black gangs in LA” screams the headline of this article in the Daily Mail. A friend at the Writers’ News Talkback chatroom posted the link this morning. Having just finished my most recent edit of Silence (all but one last read before letting Tom get his hands on it!), I find myself attempting to describe it in one phrase. I came up with ‘fake autobiography’. Of course, it’s not a real fake, so to speak, because I’m not trying to fool anyone or commit fraud – Silence is a novel and always has been.

I am however, fascinated by the phenomenon of real fakes, when authors or publishers are truly trying to pull the wool over the book-buyers’ eyes, as with J.T. Leroy and James Frey (though this isn’t fake, more like exaggerated). It does make me wonder about the public attitude to books and the nature of truth. Does a memoir have a greater impact than a novel, simply because it is ‘true’? Does a novel contain less truth about the world simply because it is fiction? Truth is a subjective experience anyway, and if my sister were to write a memoir of our childhood I’m sure it would be very different to my own.

I recently heard an interview with Alice Seabold, author of Lucky and The Lovely Bones, both of which I’ve read. She said that Lucky (which is a memoir of the time she was raped in college) was written as a part of the process of writing The Lovely Bones (which is a novel narrated by the ghost of a murdered girl). She wrote the memoir to avoid putting too much of herself into the novel, to get the story out of her system, but not intending to publish it. Her publisher then recommended that the two books were published in synchrony. I find the style very different in the two books – the memoir being much more like journalism (Seabold is a journalist). I was interested to hear this as I did a similar thing while writing Silence, though don’t intend to publish my half-an-autobiography until I’ve lived a bit longer.

I feel strongly about this worrying trend towards sensational non-fiction in the book market, which is one of the reasons my novel has the theme. Anyway, this is the comment I posted at the Daily Mail site, which made it at 1 character under the maximum (I’m so glad Legend don’t have a restriction on post length):

The market is flooded with ‘misery memoirs’, and being so popular it’s not surprising that there will continue to be books written using the same format. I refer to my own novel as a ‘fake autobiography’ but have always been totally honest about it being fiction. It’s nothing new to write a novel as if it were true, couched in terms of a memoir, letters or diary. The difference with this story is that the author was not honest with the publisher, which meant that the public might feel betrayed if they bought a book that was supposed to be a ‘true story’ which turned out to be fiction. Why not write it as a novel? Did she assume that it wouldn’t sell? Did she already try to get it published as a novel and was rejected? As usual with news, we only know what we’re told about this. The cynical part of me wonders if the publisher did know that it was fiction, and this was planned as a publicity stunt. Would a first novel have had this level of coverage if there wasn’t a ‘scandal’ involved?

As usual I grab every opportunity to plug my book, but thought better of putting the title in my comment, as I was criticising publicity stunts!

Josie

Should Harry Come Home?

A diversion from the blog about fiction writing to think about this ‘media blackout’ on Prince Harry in Afghanistan for a minute. Bear with me because I do have a point relating to my novel.

I never agreed with the war in the first place and believe it was handled badly. The British army should pull out gradually and safely and I think this is what they are doing. But how are we to know except what we are told by the media who are manipulated by the establishment and so easily manipulate public opinion?

Prince Harry is an individual who has his own values and motivations, like any of the other soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t disagree personally with their freedom of choice as to where they want to work or how they live their lives. I just worry about the way the world is going.

I think that ‘publicity stunt’ is a negative jibe for what seems to be a highly choreographed morale-booster for the country and the other soldiers. People who comment that if it were secret how come there are pictures have obviously not read the full reports. The reporters were given access to Harry as part of the deal to keep it quiet. They obviously knew that at some point the story would come out, and then they could use the footage. Even if the story didn’t leak while he was there, they would use it afterwards. As anyone with any knowledge of media knows, these things are often set up and filmed far in advance of when they are screened. Wars are fought with swords no longer, but with sound-bites, words and pictures.

As for whether he should come home or not, well (apart from the fact that I think they should all come home) I think it’s up to him and his army superiors to decide. When was the last time a British royal led his troops into battle? Might it have been King Richard in the Battle of Bosworth? In that case, I think he’s done the job he set out to do i.e. take a prominent stance to show that the British are not cowards. Though there will always be people who say he’s a puppet, he’s just a person like the rest of us.

My biggest concern that has come from this story is what else is the media not telling us? With how many other stories might there be some dark deal struck between the government and the press, who are waiting for a slow news day to burst forth with salacious hot gossip? How many more skeletons are going to come out of closets? (In the current furore in Jersey, I would say quite a few.)

And that’s where we come to the relevance to my novel, which reads between the newspaper headlines and sees shades of grey where they would try to tell us it is all black and white.

Josie

Edit: Having just read the blog of Jon Williams (BBC's world news editor), I can understand perfectly why the media blackout was in place. But my point still remains that we live in a culture of perpetuating secrets and lies. They may be exposed by tabloids and serious reporting alike, but we rarely see the full picture. Life is never as simple as the exclusive or extensive reportage.

New writers: line up here for your Zadie Smith-shaped punchbags

Oh I don’t know, I mean, she has got a point, hasn’t she? It’s just the sheer unadulterated brass-necked CHEEK of the woman…

For those of you who haven’t caught up with the mini-saga that is the Willesden Herald Short Story competition and Zadie Smith’s response to it, it goes something like this. Zadie, the celebrity judge for the quirky website’s short story competition, decided after reading this year’s shortlisted stories that none of them showed ‘greatness’ and so she couldn’t pick a winner. The Willesden blog states, fairly enough, “I think there are few prizes of this size that would have the integrity not to award a prize… The little Willesden Herald prize is only about good writing.”

Unfortunately, the shortlisted writers had already been contacted to put the prize-giving date in their diaries, and on hearing Zadie Smith’s decision, they refused to have their names attached in any way to the competition, and declined to split the £5,000 prize money. That’s now been donated to Comic Relief, which kind of sums up the whole sorry little episode.

I have to declare an interest here, as I was one of the regrettably too-shite entrants, not even making it onto the shortlist (God, how useless must I be?) The aspect the Sunday papers picked up on was obviously not the red-cheeked mortification suffered by the writers who entered, but the fact that Zadie then went on to attack literary prizes in general, claiming they are, “only nominally about literature… they are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies.”

Pretty rich, they point out, (and I agree!) for someone who has won both the Orange prize (£30,000 from a phone company) and the former Whitbread Award (another £30,000 from the brewery). She doesn’t appear to be in any rush to hand back the cheques, let alone the cash earned from the massive extra sales generated by being a (deserving) prize winner.

So what do you think? A case of a successful novelist biting the hand that feeds, and then pushing away the ladder behind her so that others can’t follow - or a well justified attack on the way that big business can corrupt something as essentially esoteric as literature? Me, I just know that I could really have used the Willesden’s five grand, or even a share of it. Guess I’ll have to try harder next time…

For more details: www.willesdenherald.blogspot.com

Emma Seaman (author from all three collection in Legend Press' Short Story Reinvented series)