The truth about truth is that it is elusive. Inexact. Fickle. Subjective. Selective. Short-lived. When truth happens, a person can see it, and see it clearly, just for an instant. In the next instant, unless it is transcribed exactly, that moment of truth becomes memory. Then the trouble starts.
All of those were in play when James Frey wrote his infamous memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” about his experience as an addict. That’s not why he was called on the carpet last week by Oprah Winfrey and others. For all its ambiguities, the truth is still the truth. Frey in his memoir went beyond that. He lied. He made things up. That’s why he was called out.
But the big after-story is not about Frey’s lies. Hey. There’s a book title: “Frey’s Lies.” Coming soon to a bookstore near you. All the talk, though, since Frey’s public flogging, has been about the future of the truth, in non-fiction publishing, whether in memoirs or everyday news.
And the truth is, truth is an approximation with which the majority agrees. Five people witnessing the same event will result in five versions of that event, no two alike. Unless there is a recording, the factual truth of the event is lost, becoming a matter of who you talk to. At a big football game, a newspaper typically sends three professionals to cover the game: one to write the game story, a second to write the color story, or “sidebar,” and a third, the columnist, to put his or her spin on the game. In the locker room after the game, these three will gather around the coach. One of them will ask why his team lost. The coach will give an answer.
In the next morning’s paper, each writer will quote the coach, and none of the quotes will be exactly alike. What, exactly, did the coach say? No one knows, the morning after, not even the coach. Anyone who has ever been interviewed, and then read the quotes in the morning paper, has had this reaction: “Did I really say that?” Unless there’s a recording to check, you will never know.
That’s how the truth is. It puffs and scatters through your fingers like smoke, because memory, which is nothing more than five-second-old, or 50-year-old, truth, is fickle, and selective. Make a simple 10-word statement into the ear of the person next to you, and ask that person to pass it around the table of 10 people, and when the message gets back to you, it will have changed, according to the unique mysteries occurring at that moment in the minds of the 10 people.
Most truths, as we experience them, are also incomplete. If a man kisses a woman for the first time, and then writes a memoir about it, he can only approximate the truth as he remembers it. Unless he asks her what she felt, and includes that information, then his memory of the truth is not only an approximation, it is incomplete. (Reading the woman’s stand-alone memoir of that same kiss would be astonishing proof of this.)
James Frey wrote about root canals being performed on him without anaesthesia. It must be a lie, we think, but it may be, in part at least, a version of incomplete truth. Did he ask the dentist what he was doing, at each step of the procedure? If not, how could he know he didn’t receive Novocain?
This is a pertinent question to me, about what the truth is, because on Jan. 5 I underwent hip replacement surgery. I truly fear the after-effects of general anaesthesia, so I chose a spinal anaesthetic, even though I would be awake throughout the procedure. I must say it was very interesting (I have a clinical turn of mind). I have been eager to share the experience with others, most of whom were not keen to hear.
But if I did, I would be telling an incomplete truth. I could hear everything, but I couldn’t see anything; my head was tented by green sheeting. If I simply described the sounds, without any other context, you could believe I was writing about a foundry. I have told friends I heard a high-pitched whine, an electric saw, and then resistance, as the saw met bone (hey, if you can spend $15 to read about Frey’s root canals, you can read this).
But it may not have been a saw at all. It may have been a reamer of some kind; I couldn’t know, without seeing, or asking the surgeons (which I thought about but decided against). In the memoir, therefore, if I were thinking like James Frey, I would have had license to choose: saw, or reamer, depending on which would part customers fastest from their 15 bucks.
Frankly I would have chosen the reamer. Would I have been telling the truth? I honestly don’t know. Memoirs are packed, intentionally or not, with such ambiguities. Now Frey has loosed a virus, the Truth Virus, that is likely to delete the genre altogether, even though incomplete truth is probably the best that the best of us can provide about ourselves.
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