Bookmarks: Orwell blogs, Chabon wins big, China’s publishing industry goes quiet

Some book-related links:

• Orwell, the blogger (Time)
• Hugo Awards awarded – Chabon wins the big one (The Hugo Awards)
• China’s publishing industry shuts down during Olympics (The New York Times)
• A pair of Canadians (including Q&Q contributor Ian Daffern) have online comic in contention in DC Comics contest (Shock Effect blog)
• Jerusalem’s Russian Library (Jerusalem Post)
• Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish dies (Reuters)
• Canongate publisher Jamie Byng blasts Bookers for not picking Canongate book (The Age)
• Muslim scholar’s novel angers Egyptian Christians (GulfNews.com)
• A guide to all those semi-fictional addiction memoirs (CBC.ca)
• Library overdue fees go to help flood victims (IndyStar.com)

The coming year in memoir fraud

We here at Quillblog remember a day – back when we were young and having remarkable and poignant experiences we reserve the right to one day lay out in book form – when memoirs were expected to be at least within the neighbourhood of the truth. In these relativist times, however, when the boundaries between “truth” and “fiction” are just about non-existent, a memoir is most commonly defined as “a novel, told in the first person, that sells a hell of a lot of copies.”

Over at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke wonders how the hell this all came to be. Slate also give us a sneak peek at the memoir scandals we can expect to see over the next couple of months, including at-last revealed stretchers from St. Augustine (“’There’s just no reason to believe that the thornbushes of lust ever grew rank about his head,’ says historian Carlo Ricci….”) and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi (“Satrapi does in fact have both lips and eyelids. She also confessed to ‘completely making up the whole two-dimension thing.’”).

Dream rocker bios for Canadian publishers

In the wake of the mammoth contract granted to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards for the story of his life, The Globe and Mail‘s Matt Hartley asked three Canadian publishers which Canuck rockers’ memoirs they would most like to publish. McClelland & Stewart’s Doug Pepper thinks autobiographies by Neil Young or Rush singer Geddy Lee would be highly desirable; Kim McArthur of McArthur & Company, which has printed memoirs by Randy Bachman and Natalie MacMaster (to be released this fall), dreams of publishing Joni Mitchell; Jack David of ECW Press, which has already done three books by Rush drummer Neil Peart, would like to print Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies.

No one seems to want to touch anything written by Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger, but surely it’s only a matter of time.

(Neil Young photo courtesy of CanadianContent.)

Misery loves company

As reported in an article from the Independent, “misery literature” is gaining in popularity, especially in the form of memoirs. Last year, the bestselling memoir in the UK, Behind Closed Doors by Jenny Tomlin, which discusses her childhood experiences of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and neglect, out-sold the Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss by more than six times.

Most of the misery titles are sold in paperback form, and are purchased from supermarket shelves. But now bookstores are tapping into the market as well: one of the UK’s largest retail booksellers, Waterstones, has formed a “painful lives” section.

While Quillblog understands that many people write such books to “help”, ostensibly, others in similar situations, the header of “painful lives” gives a creepy, voyeuristic feel to the section that seems to take too much enjoyment in the real struggle the books recount.

Frey speaks, selectively

In case anyone missed it, James Frey has spoken in-depth to a reporter – Laura Barton, writing for The Guardian – for the first time since the massive controversy over his Oprah-anointed but exaggerated “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. The interview makes for a longish and frustrating and not very rewarding piece, so we’ll save you some time by highlighting the most salient points.

1. All that media attention sure has made for a rough few months.

2. People on the street understand, though. “Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew.”

3. Doubleday surely must have known from the start that Pieces was a “manipulated manuscript.”

4. Frey was a cultural scapegoat. “People feel frustrated by a lot of distortions by politicians, by members of the media, by movie stars, by tabloid journalists, and it was like a sorta confluence of events that I happened to be in the middle of.”

5. The Smoking Gun, the website that broke the news of the book’s falsehoods, was just doing its job – but really, it’s kind of a sleazy job, innit? “Their job is to get people to come to their website, to look at what they do. I just never thought that I was that big a target.”

6. He did have an anesthesia-free root canal – or at least, that’s what’s “true to my memory.”

7. North Americans can’t grasp the nuances of the dance between fiction and non- because they’re simply unsophisticated. “I think it has in certain ways to do with being a young culture, with being a culture that has less of an artistic and literary canon than some of the older European cultures.”

8. The publishers and agents who disowned Frey during the controversy are still making lots of money from his work.

Actually, he may have a point with that last one.

A couple of points that are intriguingly not explored in the article are: (a) How has Frey spent the money he’s made? Has he given any of it away? And (b) If the book was always meant to be a kind of postmodern freeplay of fact and fiction, why did he repeatedly insist that every word was true until it was proven otherwise?

Anyway, lest we think that the Frey fiasco has soured the market on confessional memoirs, writer Choire Sicha sets us straight with a feature in The New York Observer. And the story looks at the interesting question of where the policies of Alcoholics Anonymous — to which many such memoirists belong — fit in. “Members of A.A. have been struggling with the significance of that second ‘A’ for more than half a century. Within the group, members openly discuss their alcoholism; outside the group, they refrain from discussing their membership. That’s the theory.”

Related links:
Click here for the James Frey interview
Click here for the New York Observer feature

On the graphic memoir

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently posted an article on its website about the rise of graphic memoirs, or memoirs in comic book form. This news itself isn’t so noteworthy: with numerous autobiographically inspired books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (published in 1992), Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You (1994), Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis books already in existence, memoirs have long been a staple category in the comix genre. What’s interesting is the continuing acceptance of the form mainstream publishers, as shown by the glut of graphic memoirs slated for release this year from conventional trade publishers like HarperCollins, Knopf, and Houghton Mifflin.

The other thing that’s unusual is that the exact subject matter of these new memoirs differs somewhat from the traditional historical and youth romance paragons of the genre. Houghton Mifflin’s upcoming release is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, about Bechdel’s closeted gay father and her childhood spent in the family funeral home, while Dragonslippers, by Rosalind B. Penfold, is about an abusive relationship. (The latter was first published in Canada by Penguin Canada.) There are also three new graphic novels that take personal looks at cancer.

Related links:
Click here for the piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer

A year in the life

Lauren Beckham Falcone has an interesting piece on the Boston Herald site on what she calls Gimmick Lit, a popular new subgenre in the memoir category. Falcone writes: “Gimmick Lit – as in dating everyone who asks you out in the course of a year; trying every one of Julia Child’s recipes for 365 days; dressing up as a man for 18 months — will get you a book deal faster than finding a long-lost Hemingway manuscript.” Though the trend is not exactly new — John Howard Griffin disguised himself as a black man to write his 1959 bestseller, Black Like Me — these “participatory memoirs” have become staples on the U.S. bestseller charts in the last couple of years.

Related links:
Read the Boston Herald article

James Frey updates at the top and bottom of every hour on In Other Media

The controversy continues over allegations that James Frey invented/embellished chunks of his Oprah-sanctioned bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The latest bit of news is that the next printing of Frey’s book will include a note from the author that will address this. As Hillel Italie of The Associated Press reports, however, it is unclear what Frey will write in his author’s note: “Doubleday spokeswoman Alison Rich declined to offer details about the note or to comment on why it was being added. She would not say if the note was an acknowledgment often found in memoirs but not in A Million Little Pieces that names and events had been altered.” In Other Media is sincerely hoping that the author’s note addresses beard-trimming techniques. (Was it just me or did his beard look a little mangy on Larry King Live?)

The story broke last Sunday on The Smoking Gun, so, just in time for the weekend newspapers, readers should be girding themselves for think pieces and other related fare, like this list on the CBC Arts website of the top 10 literary hoaxes, which includes everything from Ern Malley (the inspiration for Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake) to David Solway’s creation, Andreas Karavis.

One of the best articles on the controversy so far is on Slate, where journalist Seth Mnookin, who has dealt with his own addiction problems, says that Frey’s fabrications are typical of the insecurity that he often encountered in rehab: “Based on all the evidence, it seems Frey’s weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a ‘victim’ led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt.” Mnookin goes on to point out, however, that Frey’s fabrications are significant because of the simplistic message about addiction that the book reinforces.

Related links:
Click here for the AP story
Click here for the CBC Arts
Click here for the Slate article

Like daytime television (on PBS)

Often, the stories behind books are almost as interesting as the books themselves. In the case of lost manuscripts, speculation abounds concerning the contents of books – in the words of Stuart Kelly, “The lost book, like the person you never dared ask to the dance, becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be perfect only in the imagination” – while the stories behind books, often all we have left of them, take on greater significance.

An adapted excerpt of Kelly’s new book, an exploration of the histories of could-have-been famous books that never were called The Book of Lost Books, appears on this week’s online edition of the Weekend Australian. Telling the stories of lost works by Gogol, Plath, Hemingway, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and others, his fascinating account connects books to the vagaries of their writers and historical contexts. In plots reminiscent of daytime TV dramas, writers are stricken with pious desires to burn their manuscripts, boxes of letters are buried in gardens in the anticipation of war, suitcases containing important manuscripts are left at the train station, and scandalous memoirs are destroyed to protect reputations. Oh, the intrigue!

Related links:
Click here for the adapted excerpt of The Book of Lost Books

A voice for the dying

An article in Toronto’s Eye Weekly magazine profiles a new publishing house that specializes in memoirs by and about the terminally ill. Grubstreetbooks is the creation of writer and retired Ontario College of Art and Design instructor Morris Wolfe and his partner, Joy Cohnstaedt, a retired York University professor. Wolfe lost a daughter to cancer in 2001, an experience captured in the grubstreetbooks volume Menya: An End of Life Story. Wolfe is currently editing a number of memoirs by terminally ill authors who have since passed on, as well as an oral history of Toronto’s homeless population.

Related links:
Read the Eye Weekly profile