The tide of misery memoirs, monitored here by Jonathan Morrison, may be overdue its inevitable ebb, but has nonetheless proved more enduring than previous passing fancies. Danger-zone travelogues, comedy thrillers and counter-intuitive eating may have strutted and fretted their hour, but non-celebrity memoirs have been the cash-rich option for longer than all of them.
We may wonder, as Morrison did, what the attraction is in butting in on so much private grief, the more so when it revolves around domestic squalor as opposed to, say, Maoist forced labour camps, but the burning issue that the whole genre has ignited is how much, if any, fictive licence its authors should be permitted.
For the publishers, this is clearly a hotter potato than it is for anybody else. Binjamin Wilkomirski's Holocaust memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) enjoyed a three-year reputation as a searingly honest account of life lived under Nazi persecution, nestling next to Primo Levi in the annals of bitter catharsis, before being exposed as a fake. Genuine Holocaust survivors spoke of their memories being stolen from them.
Where the stakes are less drastic, though, who really cares? Augusten Burroughs appears to have upset the family of a psychiatrist who took him in as a child with his clumsily brutal debut work, Running with Scissors (2003), in a case that went litigious late last year. Among the claims in the book being contested are that the ECT machine that had been carelessly left in a cupboard under the stairs for the kids to muck about with was actually a broken vacuum cleaner.
A Million Little Pieces (2003), James Frey's memoir of his period as an alcohol and crack addict, ratchets the prevarication factor even higher. In one incident he describes multiple assaults of police officers arresting him. In real life, it transpires, he was so docile that he didn't even need cuffing.
Such details may seem obviously fake in retrospect, but lots of us swallowed them whole at the time. And it is the perversity of the genre itself that is responsible for the subsequent feeling of having been had.
Autobiographically based writing once had no need of packaging in this True Life, Reader's Digest fashion. The journalised wanderings of Kerouac, or the fictional framing that Malcolm Lowry applies to the details of a life gone bust on booze, were not sold as the God's-own unvarnished truth by their publishers, though there may well be more of that stuff in them than there is in Wilkomirski or Frey.
If nobody is being identifiably defamed, it scarcely matters whether we believe it or not. We can be moved or richly entertained by turns by the better class of memoir, while only wondering what nicety of literary judgment (or commercial calculation, more like) prevents its creator from calling it a novel.
