What is this contemporary obsession with true stories? Why are we so in love with the memoir as a form? Why have we shifted our reading habits from fiction to non-fiction? And, finally, why do people get so bent out of shape when they learn that a memoir or piece of narrative fiction isn’t one-hundred-percent-absolutely-totally-true, dude?
The new film 21 is based on the book Bringing Down the House.
According to the Boston Globe, the book has some issues with the facts.
“When the public learns that a small piece of a supposedly nonfiction story has been fictionalized, they begin to doubt everything in that story, and when they begin to doubt a particular story then the doubts occur in their mind about whether they can trust any work, or any work of nonfiction,” says Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute.
So?
When I read the book, it was pretty clear that, in order to get anyone to talk to him about the story, the author, Ben Mezrich, had to make a lot of changes. In fact, it was clear that he had changed so much that the narrative had become a bit of a yarn.
Good readers pick up on things like this. Good readers read Bringing Down the House and take its ‘true story’ with a grain of salt. Good readers read A Million Little Pieces as what it is: a memoir, ‘a narrative composed from personal experience,’ (according to Merriam Webster).
As a culture, I worry that we have ceded too much authority on matters of truth to our institutions. Rather than use common sense to determine for ourselves what the truth is, we have allowed our government, our corporations, our media, and our schools to tell us what is true. We have lost the inquisitive spirit.
Do you still believe everything you read? Everything you see on TV? Everything on the Internet?
4 responses so far ↓
1 NanMel // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:14 am
I just want to mention that “21″ was a pretty awful movie. Regardless of the facts, or how much truth was actually in the book and thereby transfered to the movie, the movie was just plain bad. Save your money.
Also, mostly, yes, I believe everything I read. At least, I believe everything you tell me, Tom. Because why would you lie? But on a more serious note, not that I disagree, but I understand why people get so darned upset when they find out a memoir wasn’t 100% true. They wanted to believe that this wonderful amazing story actually happened to someone, thereby giving their own pathetic lives hope. When they find out part of it was a lie, they feel duped, and then discredit the whole thing.
You’re right, we may have lost the inquisitive spirit. And that is not good. But I think people are just sick and tired of being lied to. And at the base of it, that’s what they feel is happening.
In summary: “21″ is bad. You are mostly right. Stop lying to me.
2 tlitchfo // Apr 14, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Nan, you’re probably right about people looking to ‘true stories’ as sources of hope. Why else are so many movie-of-the-week type movies tagged with a ‘based on true events’ blurb?
Has life really been sapped of all hope except that which is conferred upon us by True Stories?
3 ja3 // Apr 15, 2008 at 7:41 am
And I thought I was too cynical! Obviously not, since when I read Bringing Down the House I assumed that characters and events would be merged, but didn’t think they’d be invented out of thin air.
There’s definitely something to the “want to believe” idea, though. I happened to be on a long road trip right after “Love and Consequences” was published, so I became a captive audience for an hour-long NPR interview with “Margaret B. Jones” about a week before that controversy broke.
I was certain she’d made it all up about 30 minutes into the interview. So I spent the last 30 minutes wondering why the host, probably better read and a better interviewer than me, never caught on.
I reached pretty much the same conclusion — he really WANTED all the terrible things in that book to be true. I can’t say whether he wanted a gripping hour of radio time or proof that George Bush doesn’t care about black people, but once I decided she was lying, the host’s desire to believe her just poured out of the radio.
4 tlitchfo // Apr 17, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Margaret B. Jones (nice use of quotes, John, by the way) is a different story. She manufactured her memoir out of whole cloth, as they say. There’s a difference between tweaking a few details to tighten a narrative and just plain making the whole damn thing up.
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