Writers are desperate people. As a highly successful unpublished novelist, I’m an expert on that. So when the fray about James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” hit, I have to admit: I was a little happy. One successfully published author’s misery is my slice of sunshine. But I’m not a good person. That’s why in all my novels, the characters based loosely on me are good people. It’s fiction. I exaggerate.
In my soon-to-be-published novel, “Bourbon Decay,” I have characters inspired by my parents and grandparents. Except the characters in the book are funnier and even stranger than they were, which would probably please them if they were all alive.
I was afraid my sibling, cousins, aunts and uncles would sue me, so I made all those characters up. I may have used a word or phrase here and there that real people used, but I never had a cousin who had aspirations to be the next William Faulkner or a sister who ran for the Ms. Divorced Mississippi pageant, all snippets from “Bourbon Decay.” Nor did I have two gay cousins, as Lisa Tingle in “Bourbon Decay” has. I could have written about the real people, called it a memoir, but I’m way too much of a chicken to ever do that. And what I wrote is more fun to read (in my unbiased opinion) than anything they ever did in reality. My family just was not wierd enough for me to write a memoir about. Sigh.
So for years, I’ve read memoirs with a dose of disbelief. First of all, who can remember that much detail from their life, particularly when they’ve been abusing drugs and booze? I can't tell you what I did or said last night, and I just had a glass of wine. Secondly, who is so brave that they would write about their family showing all the blemishes and ugliness? That's just dumb. And last but not least, families just never are as interesting as the lies we tell about them. Just ask James Frey. Or me.
Kudos to Oprah today for calling him and his nasty-ass publisher on the carpet. By the way, Oprah, when my book comes out, I hope you read it. I can assure you, it’s all lies. But it’s okay, I’ve published it under Fiction.
