"The story is mine"

Published Mar 10 2008, 04:04 PM by webteam

Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million) wrote what we thought was a depressing but super-smart Op-Ed piece in the Sunday Times. He makes excellent points about the fake-memoir trend, but even more important, he explains what it means to the opressed classes of individuals whose identities are being stolen in the process. Much has already been written about how race and oppressed minorities play into these book scandals (most recently, Jews and African-Americans). Mendelsohn brings that in, and makes a key connection to our culture's reality-worship. The observations he makes about our obsession with the fantasy, and the satisfaction of experiencing a "redemeptive" situation -- regardless of its validity -- are particularly chilling. An excerpt from the last part of the essay (read the whole thing if you have the time, though!):

In an era obsessed with “identity,” it’s useful to remember that identity is precisely that quality in a person, or group, that cannot be appropriated by others; in a world in which theme-park-like simulacra of other places and experiences are increasingly available to anyone with the price of a ticket, the line dividing the authentic from the ersatz needs to be stressed, rather than blurred. As, indeed, Ms. De Wael has so clearly blurred it, for reasons that she has suggested were pitiably psychological. “The story is mine,” she announced. “It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”...

“My reality” raises even more far-reaching and dire questions about the state of our culture, one in which the very concept of “reality” seems to be in danger. Think of “reality” entertainments, which so unnervingly parallel the faux-memoirists’ appropriation of others’ authentic emotional experience: in them, real people are forced to endure painful or humiliating or extreme situations, their real emotional reactions becoming the source of the viewers’ idle gratification. Think of the Internet: an unimaginably powerful tool for education but also a Wild West of random self-expression in which anyone can say anything about anything (or anyone) and have it “published,” and which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic identities, reality and fantasy.

That pervasive blurriness, the casualness about reality that results when you can turn off entire worlds simply by unsubscribing, changing a screen name, or closing your laptop, is what ups the cultural ante just now. It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before; what’s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true. Perhaps the most dismaying response to the James Frey scandal was the feeling on the part of many readers that, true or false, his book had given them the feel-good, “redemptive” experience they’d hoped for when they bought his novel — er, memoir.