We are in the midst of a cultural phenomenon ----- the lives of real people today to us seem to be infinitely more fascinating than the made up-characters of past entertainment. What intrigues us so much about these people is not just that they're real, but also the extraordinary situations they have found themselves in --- regardless of whether or not these situations are contrived. It's a common rumor that reality TV is in some way scripted, fictionalized for entertainment value. Can it still be considered reality, or is some creative license OK?
In the past month this issue was seriously questioned when Oprah chose the memoir A Million Little Pieces by James Frey for her popular book club. The memoir earned millions, and Frey received huge acclaim for his intense and nearly unbelievable depiction of his struggle to overcome addiction. It wasn't until the investigative Web site http://www.thesmokinggun.com did some research that the news broke that some very key characters, incidents and details of Frey's supposed "memoir" were in fact completely fabricated. Oprah was furious and publicly chastised him for having lied.
Last Thursday, Hopkins, too, was buzzing about this controversy when it hosted the first Mattin Center ART Munch of the semester. The Mattin ART Munch meets the first Thursday of every month, holding informal forum-like discussions, which address changing developments in the world of the arts. Mattin ART Munch, co-sponsored by the JHU Digital Media Center, Homewood Arts Program and Homewood Art Workshops, is always free and open to everyone -- faculty, students, anyone interested.
This month, the discussion revolved around the idea of fiction in memoir and was entitled "Are You Not Ashamed to Tell So Many Lies? Just What IS Fiction?" Writing Seminars faculty members and published fiction writers Jean McGarry, Stephen Dixon and Tristan Davies led the discussion; each was asked to describe, to them, "What is fiction?"
The SDS room in the Mattin Center was set up in a comfortably democratic fashion, with four tables arranged in a square in the center of the room. McGarry, Dixon and Davies sat on one side, and the visitors -- mostly Hopkins faculty or curious graduate students -- sat around the tables. The setting was much like a Writing Sems class in itself -- very conducive to intense debate while retaining a comfortable level of equality.
McGarry was first to answer. She was as prepared as any organized and diligent student would be -- notes neatly typed and placed in front of her. Author of three collections of short fiction and two novels, she is also a winner of the Southern Review/L.S.U. Short Fiction Prize and, like Dixon and Davies, is a professor of fiction here at Hopkins. She described fiction as a "condensation of life and learning." Characters, to her, are reduced versions of real people, that they live in smaller worlds and are surrounded by only a fraction of the amount of people that exist in our environments. In this understanding of fiction, the writer will know what to include and what to leave out once he knows what the story is about. With regard to the Frey scandal, McGarry commented, "We don't want people to think we're writing about our own lives." Frey's problem was just the opposite.
Dixon was next to comment and in contrast to McGarry, was very impromptu and nonchalant about his answer. The effect was one of great comic timing. "Memoirs to me are also fiction," he said. "Fiction is everything that I write." And then, after a shrug and a brief pause, "That's it for me."
Tristan Davies went on to address the idea of fact. There are small facts and large facts in fiction -- large facts being known and concrete: the capital of Maryland is Annapolis. Smaller, more obscured facts would be, say, the reaction a character has in response to the death of a loved one. Fiction, Davies believes, is much more factual than its definition suggests. The writer fictionalizes by choosing what facts to include.
The forum next opened up to questions from the audience -- one being how these authors choose what to include.
"I just sit down at the typewriter and it just comes," admitted Dixon, author of 19 books of fiction, two of which were finalists for the National Book Award, and one was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. "It's a magical processc9Very often the subject matter chooses me," he said.
Davies described falling in love with an idea like falling in love with a puppy. "You get a new puppy, you want to spend all your time with it," he said. "And then it gets to be a couple years old and it's destroying your house and everything's a mess."
To conclude the professors' responses to the James Frey scandal, each agreed that all memoirs to some extent are a kind of fiction -- a kind of "creative non-fiction." Davies, at this, added, "Comma, whatever that means."
