Oh now I get it.
James Frey, whose life story sold millions even though it wasn’t exactly his life story, has explained his whole new genre to us, on the Larry King Show (you can lie to Oprah, apparently, so long as you cover your ass on King). Here’s how it went:

FREY: We initially shopped the book as a novel and it was turned down by a lot of publishers as a novel or as a non-fiction book. When Nan Talese purchased the book, I’m not sure if they knew what they were going to publish it as. We talked about what to publish it as. And they thought the best thing to do was publish it as a memoir.
KING: Why did you shop it as a novel if it wasn’t?
FREY: I think of the book as working in sort of a tradition – a long tradition of what American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.
KING: But they all said fiction.
FREY: Yes, they did. And at the time of their books being published, the genre of memoir didn’t exist. I mean, the genre of memoir is one that’s very new and the boundaries of it had not been established yet.
KING: But you will agree, if you went into a bookstore and it said memoirs, you would think non-fiction?
FREY: Yes. I mean, it’s a classification of non-fiction. Some people think it’s creative non-fiction. It’s generally recognized that the writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story. That it’s one person’s event. I mean, I still stand by the essential truths of the book.

There are so many hilarious elements there, it’s hard to know where to start. How about the idea that memoir didn’t exist as a genre in the 20th century? He’s not just a liar, he’s an ignorant schmuck. How about the allegation that the publishers knew it was a novel but decided to market it as memoir? Or the idea that you can pitch a manuscript to publishers as either fiction or non-fiction (pick whichever you need to fill out your list)? Or the dazzling audacity of the man, to place himself in the same literary tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald et al (maybe he just means drunks)?

I could go on, but everyone else is. I’ll end with this gem:

FREY: My publishers have been incredibly supportive. You know, I think they feel the same way that I do, that this is a memoir.
KING: You keep saying that, but a memoir is accepted as fact. I mean, if I see memoir, I accept it as a person’s memory of incidents or things in their life. I wrote a memoir. I may not have been exactly right, but it was my memory of incidents.
FREY: I don’t think — I think you could probably find people who would dispute every memoir that was ever published. And a lot of them have been disputed. When Jerzy Kosinski’s “Painted Bird” came out and became a big success several years afterwards, people said, “You know what? Jerzy Kosinski never went through the Holocaust.” It’s happened with a number of recent memoirs. It tends to happen with a lot of the more high-profile memoirs.
KING: And Jerzy killed himself.

You can read the entire tragic obfuscation here.

A recent conversation (let’s hope it’s apocryphal) overheard at the Barnes & Noble store in Brooklyn Heights, NY:

Lady: Excuse me, but I’m looking for a book.

Store chick: And?

Lady: I don’t remember the title or author, but the cover is purple.

Store chick: Our purple books are downstairs.

Lady: They sent me up here.

Store chick: We’re sold out of purple books. You want something in a yellow?

(From Overheard in New York – via Maud Newton)

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.
– Malcolm Bradbury

O how I love a good literary scandal. It’s indecent of me, I know. But I’ll never forget my jubilant dance around the Port Douglas newsagency on the morning the Courier Mail broke the news that the so-called Helen Demidenko’s vile, amateurish and virulently anti-Semitic The Hand That Signed the Paper was not, after all, a semi-biographical masterpiece by a young woman of Ukrainian descent who confirmed her ancestry by turning up to collect her many awards in a relentless array of peasant blouses.
No. It was a vile, amateurish and virulently anti-Semitic piece of crap by the daughter of an English taxi driver called Darville.
Weeks passed before a few writers realised that the few good passages in the book seemed familiar – because they’d been lifted from elsewhere. Further evidence of incompetence. If you’re going to knock off someone’s work in Australia, don’t pick on Thomas Kenneally – choose an author nobody’s ever read. She kept at it, too, though why any editor in Australia ever trusted her again, I don’t know. She’s not even very good. Not to mention the taste in clothes.
Loved the Norma Khouri scandal too. At last a publisher took the view that misrepresentation of yourself and your text is a contract breach. The moral: never trust anyone in a peasant blouse.
Poor old Random House. Now it’s happened again.
The Smoking Gun has published the comprehensive results of a six week investigation into the “memoir” of James Frey, A Million Little Pieces. In it, Frey apparently tells his true life story of alcoholism, drug addiction, crime and time in prison. But somehow he forgot to mention it was fiction.
Smoking Gun alleges that:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”

I haven’t read the book (too much vomiting for me). But Oprah Winfrey has. She found it so moving, she named it as her Book Club pick and catapulted it into the charts. Presumably this made him a very rich man – he’s sold almost as many copies in the US as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
In the TV interview, Frey told Oprah:
“I was a bad guy. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.”
Oprah was misled. You can’t blame her, though some commentators have. It’s clearly a very moving and popular book – but it’s not true. Doubleday/Random House are standing by their man for now. But I wouldn’t want to be the person who answers the phone when Oprah calls.
New York literary agent and blogger, Miss Snark, is interesting on the matter. “We knew,” she admitted today. “We all knew. And no-one did anything.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times, which knows the feeling only too well, says there’s more scandal to follow.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
– Victor Hugo

I tried to be good last week and read some Improving Novels, after months and months of non-fiction, research and kids’ books.
It started promisingly enough, with Conspirators, by Michael Andre Bernstein. It’s been described as Proustian, and it is indeed a faceted gem of a book: faceted in many senses; densely and carefully crafted, its core able to be viewed from many perspectives, all slightly obtuse. Proust without quite so many semi-colons, perhaps, although Bernstein’s grammar and punctuation are impeccable and engrossing (if you watch comma placement as a spectator sport, which I do).
It’s a complex thriller, really – perceptive and unflinching, populated by an entire community of interesting, if not likeable, characters, slowly entrapping the reader in a compelling web of court politics and revolutionary cells, anti-Semitism and Messianic prophecies, and capturing the lumbering Zeppelin that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire before it crashed and burned. Over it all, at least in the mind of the know-all reader, hangs that stultifying fog of foresight: these bright, if silly, young revolutionaries will all soon be dead in World War One; this thriving Jewish community will be gone in another generation.
Things went a little downhill after that, with Elizabeth Knox’s Billie’s Kiss. I expected much of it, with all her awards and fellowships, and locals here raving about every new book. I admit that Daylight has been sitting in the To Read pile by my bed for a year – you have to be in quite a specific mood for a vampire novel, and I’ve never quite got there. Still, I launched into Billie’s Kiss with enthusiasm, and then found myself laughing out loud a few times in the first few chapters at jarring metaphors and ill-considered adjectives. But finally the plot carried me along through its currents, all Edwardian sideburns and sullen Scots islanders. Again, it becomes something of a thriller, and again the war clouds hang low. I read it in one sitting, which can’t be all bad, but finally felt let down by some rapid plot resolution and the tying up of character loose-ends which could have happily been left frayed.
That was the end of my experiment. I promise to try harder. But then I couldn’t resist the temptation of Richard Holmes’ Footsteps, following the travels and travails of RL Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft in Revolutionary Paris, and Shelley’s final years in Italy. The Wollstonecraft chapter led me on to Brian Dolan’s Ladies of the Grand Tour, and then the idea of Paris under siege made me pick up a pop history of the Comet Line, Freedom Line, paying tribute to the Belgian, French and Basque people who risked their lives to rescue airmen shot down over Nazi-occupied Europe.
Now it’s back into the welcoming leaves of Jan Morris, with her final volume in the Britannia triptych, Farewell the Trumpets. That makes me happy.
But the more I read, the more books I urgently have to write, so I might just stick to Who Weekly from now on.

You won’t want to believe these are true, but if Miss Snark says so, they’re true. Gasp in horror, shriek, wince, and snort coffee out your nose at these excerpts from stories submitted to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Then go double-check everything you ever wrote.
My favourites:

Out of the dark void came what looked like a giant rabbit followed by small rabbits which had looked as if they had undergone a mutation with three ears and 2 tails. They discovered they were on Rabbitania.

Jake was not a man to show much emotion, but he found himself supressing the urge to smile out loud.

They were human in every way but they owned the necks, heads, facial expressions were that of a chicken.

Ashala’s head felt like vermicelli slowly slipping off the platter of her sholders.

It’s excruciating. But hilarious. The spelling and all other quirks are original – remember these next time you use the right-click Word thesaurus:

The afternoon was very calm but consolidated. The birds were singing but were not blithesome.

“Stand slow!” a voice rang out with hollow ubiquity.

Indulge in the complete agonising experience here (and if you’re a writer or interested in getting published, Miss Snark’s is the blog du jour).

When I flew out of Melbourne on New Year’s Eve it was 32 degrees (that’s Celsius) at 9am. 44 bushfires were burning further north.
I get very confused at airports. I forget where home is. Deep in my being, home is Melbourne. But for the past seven years, it’s been elsewhere – the place where my partner is, where I live, where my books and stuff are waiting, where I work. But I forget.
This is nothing new. It was worst when I lived in Sydney and shuttled back and forth to Melbourne for work all the time. I’ve often tried to get on the wrong plane in those middle of the night transits in Dubai or Singapore, not quite awake and heading in the wrong direction.
At the weekend I remembered to stand in the correct check-in queue, even though it was only 7am, but by the time I got to the counter, my mind had wandered. Airports do that to me.
“And where are we off to today?” asked the Qantas man.
“Melbourne,” I said, confidently.
“You’re already in Melbourne,” he said gently.
“Oh, well – must be the other place.”
“You need to give me more of a hint,” he said. He’d probably been working since 4am. They were checking in four flights at once. “The possibilities are Japan, Shanghai via Sydney, Auckland or Hong Kong.”
“I’ll take Auckland,” I said, even though I’m desperate to go to Shanghai and Hong Kong’s one of my favourite cities.
I blame e-tickets. You don’t have a bit of paper that tells you where you’re flying, or, more importantly, tells the weary airline staff which flight you’ve booked. Well, I might have printed it out but it’s … somewhere. I need it pinned to my lapel, like Paddington Bear. If only I could figure out which destination to write on the label.

Back home everyone said I didn’t have any talent. They might be saying the same thing here, but it sounds better in French.

– Jerry (played by Gene Kelly), An American In Paris.

I’m flying to Melbourne today to see my family. Here in Auckland there’s a gale force wind and it’s been raining all week. You’d never know it’s summer. Across the Tasman, three states have declared total fire bans and bushfire season is well underway.
A few years ago, I lived in the bush south of Sydney. On Christmas Day a huge firestorm swept through the National Park, burning three quarters of it (that’s a lot of trees – a lot of animals). I was in Melbourne, as usual, for Christmas lunch, and watched the fire front get closer to my house – on the TV news.
So on Boxing Day (or maybe it was the day after) my brother drove me back from the beach house in the middle of the night to the airport, I jumped on a plane, and went back to Sydney to defend my home.
Our town was blocked off by the fire. I had to leave the car across the water and get a ferry. By then the fire front was visible from the roof, heading our way. The sun was blood-red, like Mordor. I was the hobbit.
One day I’ll be able to describe what it’s like to choose a suitcase worth of your life – just enough to carry – and make the decision to leave everything else: thousands of books, paintings, memories, stuff. I’ve got a lot of stuff. Your grandmother’s sewing machine. The painting you did aged five that Dad had framed. Photos – hopefully someone else has the negatives. Gifts from lovers, from children, from friends. I’ve written before about choosing one book to save.
I had time to say goodbye. I had time to clear up the bush debris and soak the grass and climb on the roof with the hose to fill the gutters with water. I had night after night on watch, eyes streaming with the smoke, endless repetition on the fire warnings coming over the radio, endless hosing and raking and covering windows.
The fire stopped outside town. We were saved by a wind change and some very brave and dauntless fire fighters. We were driving through it for days, as the fire brigades mopped up: flames right next to the road, smoke spewing everywhere, until it rained at last.
It’s no coincidence that I’ve been writing a story about the Great Fire of London for the last few months, about random flames, power, smoke, ferocity and dread.
So my thoughts are with everyone in that town tonight (since the bush will have just grown back enough for the leaf litter to have built up again) and every other town facing the possibility of an inferno over the next few days.
As we say in Aussie, avagoodweegend.
The blog will be off the air while I deal with a roast lunch and plum pudding (probably in 35 degree heat, but we’re used to it).