Be on the lookout for a sharp contrast between Random House's defensive response to initial reports that James Frey's best-selling "A Million Little Pieces" was built on a fabricated house of cards way Simon & Shuster reacts to the possibility of a purloined book proposal. The heads-up, as so often happens, came from my colleague, the increasingly famous and reliable Jim Romenesko who caught my interest with a report from Women's Wear Daily about a book proposal based, allegedly, on quotes lifted from other writers.
The writer, Emily Davies, a former fashionista for the Times of London, fessed up to WWD about sticky fingers as she shopped a proposal for a memoir, “How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion’s Front Line,” that reportedly won her a $900,000 advance. As plagiarists go, her excuse reaches a new level of self-delusion.
"Davies...responded to WWD’s questions with a statement defending her actions in the proposal. Saying it was “not intended for public consumption,” Davies claimed, in effect, that it was easier for her to give prospective publishers the flavor of her memoir by appropriating other writers’ words than by relying on her own memories. “The first thing I did when I began putting together my proposal…was to dig out a mass of notes, cuttings and stories I had assembled over the years.…Although I used these notes in the proposal, there would be no question of my using any unoriginal material in my finished book.”
But WWD's Jeff Bercovici quotes an unnamed " agent in the memoir market (who) said it was by no means standard practice for memoirists to borrow the work of other writers, uncredited, in their proposals. The agent predicted that Simon & Schuster, having watched Random House take a drubbing in the press for publishing Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” would drop the book: “People are just so on-edge about this kind of stuff now.”
They don't have to be. There are scrupulously honest memoirists out there who make it clear that there are ethical ways to summon the past in print. They're the kind of memoirists that publishers need to hold up as examples to writers, editors and agents. It would be one way to swing the pendulum away from scandal.
great post. It's funny how the pendulum swings, for sure. I like the attitude of taking postive memoirists and holding them up, rather than beating on all the pseudo-memoirists like a dead horse.
Posted by: brian | March 20, 2006 at 11:55 PM
As usual, I enjoyed your thought-provoking post Chip ...
CODA: It used to be said that everyone had a novel in them. Just now, though, you would probably be obliged to doubt the basic proposition: what everyone has in them these days is not a novel but a memoir.
-Martin Amis in his autobiography, Experience
I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
-Philip Roth
The book publishing industry is like no other industry. If you want to be a lawyer, you go to law school; if you want to be a doctor, you go to med school. There is no equivalent to these in book publishing or film-making. The only constant is this: everyone finds their own way in ...
Kate Braverman knows well why so many people blog or why they write memoirs:
"Writing is like crime. The page is about what you can get away with. We break and enter, transgress, autopsy the living and dead, rob, exchange identities, lie, confess, steal. The arts of writing and successful crime are the same. Opportunity. Robbery. Seizure. Con. Misdirection. Theft. Fiction is a form of fraud, the most elegant, exquisite and complicated forms of creative fraud."
Posted by: Jozef Imrich | March 23, 2006 at 06:25 AM