The first publishing scandal I can remember involving a memoir was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. The memoir was published in 2003 and selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2005. If it hadn’t been for Oprah, I feel sure the resulting scandal would have never occurred. Prompted by the massive publicity, an independent media outlet known as the Smoking Gun decided to look more closely at the veracity of Frey’s story and called out his fabrications. While other media outlets had raised questions about Frey’s account (his story does beggar belief from page one), no one had really looked into it.
After the revelation his story wasn’t entirely true, Oprah brought Frey back on the show to shame him on national television. And not only that, she brought on his publisher, Nan Talese, and interrogated her as well. Talese admitted she had not fact-checked the work.
At the time, I felt a little bad about the grilling they both received, because I consider memoirs to be as creative as fiction, inventing and imposing a narrative on events that have no meaning otherwise. (But events that can’t be disproven, one assumes, by looking at the factual record.) At first, Oprah tried to defend Frey, saying in an interview with Larry King Live that what mattered was not the truth, but the book’s value as a therapeutic tool for addicts. She reversed course quickly.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the case of Raynor Winn and her memoir The Salt Path (Penguin Michael Joseph, 2018), made into a feature film starring Gillian Anderson. A mainstream media outlet, The Observer, took a closer look at the story and found an author who has deceived readers and left out important details. Winn says the Observer’s reporting is “highly misleading.” Her next memoir with Penguin has been delayed as a result.
Every so often, the public is reminded, in clear and unambiguous terms, that publishers don’t fact-check the books they publish. They do conduct legal reviews, but that has a different purpose than fact-checking. Legal review is meant to prevent defamation suits. Fact-checking is confirming that everything that’s written is true—a time-consuming and expensive task that publishers put on authors’ shoulders. There are often calls for the industry to change, but it hasn’t, and I can assure you it won’t.
In an article in The Times (UK), Johanna Thomas-Corr asked publishing professionals how such a thing could happen. I see embarrassment all around, but no reason to conclude it won’t happen again. It’s always happening, which is why I find it pointless to inquire how this could happen. The sad truth is that the public invests a lot of undeserved authority in both authors and publishers.
Finally and unfortunately, I agree with Thomas-Corr about the effects these invented life stories have on the wider world of memoirists: “They are under pressure to squish their painful life experiences into neat salvation packages. There’s a formula to this market-driven life writing, with its preordained redemptive arc.” That’s what the publishing industry asks for because that’s what readers buy, and it will certainly continue.
For further context, I recommend “Inside the Salt Path controversy: ‘Scandal has stalked memoir since the genre was invented’” in The Guardian; hat tip to Ian Lamont for pointing me to The Times article noted above.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
