Friday, April 18, 2008
My birthday wish list
My three favorite authors are all coming out with new books between now and my birthday. If you want to be my favorite person, you could buy them for me! 'Twould be a terrific little birthday package; containing one, two, or ALL THREE. They are: Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey, A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs, and When You are Engulfed by Flames, David Sedaris. I will read them promptly, whilst ignoring my two jobs and summer school work.
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6 comments:
Hello. This post is likeable, and your blog is very interesting, congratulations :-). I will add in my blogroll =). If possible gives a last there on my blog, it is about the Teclado e Mouse, I hope you enjoy. The address is http://mouse-e-teclado.blogspot.com. A hug.
Dear Mouse,
Your comment is simply lovely. I'm not sure I will be able to gives a last there on your blog, because I'm not sure what it means. A hug to you too.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html
This sort of disenchanted me with James Frey.
Okay let me give you a link that works
I decided to like him anyways--I liked the books for the content, not because I relied on them as gospel to get me off the crack. I am disenchanted with Oprah, though. She used to be...not so sucky?
My take on the whole thing (and I think about it way too much because the same has been happening to lots of authors) is that the category "autobiography" was created for a reason, and that's to be an account of someone's life written by that person. Ergo, a memoir is something else, and it can have all the little fabrications (or big ones) it wants. So long as theres some basis in the author's life, I'm happy with it. When the whole scandal happened, I was confused that people didn't see the distinction between autobiography and memoir, and while I made up my own definitions, why else would there be these two distinct categories? Plus, embellishment is the spice of life!
Yeah Oprah used to be less lame, but she also used to have less money. And I think she used to be on crack.
I agree that while an autobiography is something that should go through a fact-checker, a memoir is more of a representation of how you remembered things--your own interpretation.
However, I feel like it should still be the way you remember it. Maybe one person remembers it this way and another person remembers it that way, but I like it if SOME version of the events did, indeed, happen.
I still like MIllion Little Pieces as a novel, for content, because I loved reading it. However I don't think much of James Frey for positing it as a work of non-fiction, when it isn't, if that makes sense.
How are you?
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