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more and more illnesses. Science proves me right—the great laws of the universe, the inevitability of entropy. The illness memoir is a kindly attempt to keep company, a product of our culture’s love of pathology or of our sometimes whorish selves, a story of human suffering and the attempts to make meaning within it, and finally, a reflection on this awful and absurd and somehow very funny truth, that we are all rotting, rotting, even as we write.

    When Frey, LeRoy, Defonseca, Seltzer, Rosenblat, Wilkomirski, et al. wrote their books, of course they made things up. Who doesn’t? Each one said sure, call it a novel, call it a memoir; who’s going to care? I don’t want to defend Frey per se—he’s a terrible writer—but the very nearly pornographic obsession with his and similar cases reveals the degree of nervousness on the topic. The huge loud roar, as it returns again and again, has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama.

    The JT LeRoy contretemps: we’ll write some novels, have someone pretend to be him so that we have a huge backstory, which is what gives the whole thing a claim on anyone’s heart. No one gives a damn anymore about the garret-bound artist struggling with his “truth” narrative. Contemporary narration is the account of the manufacturing of the work, not the actual work. What I’m interested in: the startling fragment, left over from the manufactured process. Not the work itself but the story of the marketed incident, the whole industry surrounding a work’s buzz. We want the vertiginous details. If you think the heart is deceitful above all things, you should meet the author.

    A frankly fictional account would rob the memoir/counterfeiter, his or her publishers, and the audience of the opportunity to attach a face to the angst.

    What if America isn’t really the sort of place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead it’s the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?

    “JT LeRoy” was nothing more or less than a highly developed pen name.

    Margaret Seltzer wanted so badly not to be the person she was (upper-middle-class girl from the Valley) that she imaginedherself all the way into strangers’ lives, and cared so much about bringing attention to those lives that she phrased her tale as memoir, because relatively few people care about novels anymore. Misha Defonseca, author of the Holocaust “memoir”
Surviving with Wolves
—pretty much the same thing.

    Frey’s narrative: frat boy in free fall arises from misanthropy and is salvaged by literary industry, which is now a subset of multimedia saturation, of which Oprah forms a higher denomination. Oprahcam tells us that we are all abused in some way, but we need arbiters to sift through the dirt for the story that can be marketed as emblematic. We begged Frey to produce self-flagellating myth, and he complied. Frey and millions behind him line up to humiliate themselves for the sole purpose of being marketed. It’s so common to expect an abuse story that we have to stifle our yawns when we hear of further deceit, recrimination, backstabbing. Frey, that Puritan, witnessed what it means to be senseless while on drugs, but he can’t admit he had fun. He made more sense when he was wasted.

    Fragments, The Hand That Signed the Paper, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, The Honored Society, Forbidden Love, A Million Little Pieces, Surviving with Wolves, Love and Consequences, Angel at the Fence:
all in turn were used as paper tigers to once again misposition memoir as failed journalism.

    Frey was crucified for a handful of inaccuracies in no way essential to the character and spirit of the book. All our sins are passed onto/unto him. Violence implies redemption: our suddenhatred toward Frey was due to the