It's All True, Except for the Banana

That's what storyteller Spalding Gray once said before he launched into his monologue "Swimming to Cambodia." 

The banana part was pretty great, and after you heard it, you wished it were true, which was something Gray knew a lot about: wishing things were true.

I miss Spalding Gray, sort of.  The storytelling part of him, probably not so much the over-focused artist part of him.  I would like him to have recovered from his terrible injuries and his brain damage and interviewed regular citizens in Iraq, I would like for him to have Swum to Baghdad.  I would like his two cents on the two latest busted storytellers,  JT Leroy and James Frey...I would like him to interview them.   Instead, I'm afraid we'll get disclaimers and Web sites and lots of speculation about What This Means.  I hope Oprah gets mad. I would like to see that.

And it does suck, on some basic levels.  Frey apparently appropriated a terrible accident that killed people and...took credit for causing it? JT Leroy begged for money from people like the fabulous Susie Bright, and then dumped her as he/she/they moved higher up the celebrity food chain.

Human beings lie.  We just do. It's probably something built in to our DNA, one of those clever evolutionary gimmicks.  But just like our metabolisms, used to starve and binge in the wild, perhaps this is one adapative behavior that no longer works as well in our current info-overloaded environment, and this era, to quote Stephen Colbert, of Truthiness.

Comments

[Ellen]

What is weird for me is that I'm writing a novel using real life events as fodder but also making stuff up. But I wonder if it will be taken as memoir anyway, to a certain extent.

Dave Eggers "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" was, as I recall, sold as a novel but has been treated as a memoir and seems mostly to be one. As a novel, I don't think it works very well. I assumed as I was reading that it was a memoir.

Whatever happened to writing autobiographical novels, where the book is actually a novel, with all that entails, even if it's based on stuff the author experienced. Such books aren't just diaries of "what happened" but a shaping of events and impressions into something new.

Ellen

[Martha]

I think we're going through a weird hunger for stuff that "feels" true...even when it isn't. Heavily edited reality TV, 24 hours news, the sad flat literal-mindedness of so much of our lives--I think it's all jacked up the interest in "real" stories.

Some of it, too, is just marketing. I remember when Caleb Carr published "The Alienist," and he went very public with part of his background--that is, that his father had been convicted of murdering a man who stalked him. There were more than the usual parallels with Caleb's book...and I'm sure it didn't hurt sales at all. It was a hook for a novel that had a pretty good hook already, but it really pumped up interest. I think it's easier to find these sort of "hooks" whenn something is sold as non-fiction.

Don't be discouraged. I know the pendulum will swing back to fiction again, and surprise the hell out of the pundits.