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Memoirs true and false.

Article Excerpt
Memoir: 1. A memorandum or record; official note or report. 2. pl. A history or narrative composed from personal experiences and memory; often, esp., an account of one's life, or of episodes in it, written by oneself. 3. A memorial of any individual; a biography; often a biography written without special regard to completeness. 4. An account of something deemed noteworthy; an essay or dissertation; a record of investigations of any subject. (Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, 2 ed. Unabridged, 1961)

In the eleventh canto of the Inferno Dante relegates those who commit fraud to an area between the sixth and seventh circles of Hell "because fraud is a vice peculiar to man, it more displeases God; and therefore the fraudulent are placed beneath, and more pain assails them." These offenders are nestled in with hypocrites, flatterers, sorcerers, cheaters, thieves, panderers, simonists, barrators (office sellers), and "like filth." If Oprah Winfrey had her way that is just exactly where James Frey should be.

"L'Affaire Frey" made Time magazine ("The Trouble With Memoirs") after it was revealed that Frey's 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contained fabrications of one sort or another. Winfrey had championed the book on her show and felt that she had been suckered by Frey who steadfastly maintained that his "subjective retelling of events" was, in the main, true. Others disagreed, calling Frey a fraud and suggesting that other memoirists like Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) and Tony Hendra (Father Joe) were less than truthful in their books.

Controversy surrounding the memoir (and its cousin, the autobiography) as a historical and literary genre is, of course, not new. The storm created by Lillian Hellman's 1973 Pentimento tarnished her reputation so much so that one critic wrote, "Rather than mentioning the many remarkable external events of her life as America's most successful woman playwright, Hellman wrote memoirs that were so interior they were almost a fantasy.... In this respect, she may have been using some...

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