Thanks for all the nice comments on last night�s entry. I have to say that I�m more happy with the way that 15-minute entry came out than with anything I�ve written in a long time. I�m glad to hear you liked it too.

A while ago, someone who was reading this page regularly asked me if wrote fiction. My response was that I preferred to write about real life because sometimes real life throws you stories that are too good not to tell. After writing last night�s entry, I realized that was only part of it. The other part is this: writing about real life is also living poetry. And it�s not a bad place to be. When I was standing on the train platform on Saturday night, I knew that the evening was already a story, even though I hadn�t written it yet.

Which brings me, in a somewhat roundabout way, to a subject I�ve been wanting to write about here for a couple of weeks now, the question of memoir and truth. We�ve all, I�m certain, been hearing more than we wish about James Frey and JT Leroy and publishing and fraud. I realize I�m probably the last one on this bandwagon, but there are still things to be said.

In the interest of full disclosure, there is very little untrue about yesterday�s entry. I may not have got the literal transcriptions of the conversations right, but they are as close as I can recall, which is about all you can expect. I really was standing on the train platform singing Alleluia at 11:32 on Saturday night. It�s the chorus of an old Scottish carol that I first heard sung by Jean Redpath on NPR and it�s haunted me ever since. I used to sing it to AJ when he was a baby. I had meant to sing Leonard Cohen�s �Hallelujah� (that�s where the entry title comes from) but I couldn�t remember how it went, so this is what came out. The one conscious alteration I made when writing it all down was in the book I carried on the train. I really am reading Homer�s Odyssey, but it was too big to fit in my bag that day, so I took Margaret Atwood�s Penelopiad, a retelling of parts of the Odyssey, instead. But the Odyssey seemed to fit the truth of the night better. Plus I really can�t stand the Atwood.

James Frey could easily have made such a full disclosure and still published his book as memoir. I wouldn�t have paid money for it either way. [I did, however, read A Million Little Pieces in a review copy � my husband reviewed the book for a men�s magazine � before it first came out.] I suspect some responsibility for the lack of disclosure should be taken by the publisher for the deception also. I suspect his publisher told him he could sell it as a memoir but not as a novel. And while both should have ensured that either the details were changed to match the facts or a statement was made in the book itself about the nature of the inaccuracies, neither did.

It seems to be out of fashion to take responsibility for errors anymore. I blame our Presidents past and present for making it look okay. But it�s not really okay.

So is Frey guilty? Well, yes and no. Memoir is a fuzzy genre � just like memory itself � but it is supposed to be fact-based, at least. I think a transgression like Frey�s is more forgivable than it would be had the same type of deception been put over by a public figure where the truth of the life had more historical import. But in making this distinction, am I critiquing the writing or the life behind it? I�m not sure.

The greater guilt, in my mind, is in the gullible public. I read this book before any hype and thought, �This guy is full of shit.� There is no truth there. It doesn�t sound true. It sounds like adolescent self-aggrandizing drivel. I found it dull and irritating, but in no way dangerous. Surely no one would believe this to be an actual memoir. But surely people did and surely they did defend their stance when the truth came out. People, take responsibility for what you see. Do not believe everything you see in print.

But I do think there should be room in memoir for some poetic license. Sometimes merely listing the facts does not capture the soul of the story. I think memoir should be artistic (although alas, it seldom is) and some minor alterations should be allowed in the interest of explaining what happened on some more cosmic level. But where do you draw the line? That is the problem. What I learned from Frey�s ordeal is that one of the lines needs to be drawn around matters of public record.

JT Leroy�s case is another story. JT Leroy, it turns out, was a pseudonym, as had long been suspected. Pseudonyms have a fine upstanding literary tradition, as surely as my name is not really Harriet M. Welsch. JT Leroy wrote novels that were supposed to be thinly veiled autobiography, but we now know they were simply novels. That isn�t a crime; that�s a marketing plan. This marketing plan got a little carried away, though, and soon a flesh-and-blood JT Leroy began to make public appearances. Leroy was played in public by the sister (if I remember correctly) of one of the authors. The public Leroy acquired a biography and became just as fictional as the fictions Leroy supposedly wrote � the author as artwork.

Throughout all the coverage of the Frey and Leroy cases, I couldn�t help but think of Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was sold as a memoir �with fictionalized elements.� Perhaps we should stick this label on all memoirs to cover our bases. Because really, from the minute we start writing stuff down, there is fiction involved. We choose what to include, what to leave out. We choose to direct our stories to make some kind of statement. These are fictions, of a sort, or half-truths at the very least. And this is the way we want to read them. Sometimes half-truths say more than the facts ever could.

So I�m kind of feeling like I might want to do some more work on the piece I wrote yesterday, maybe do something with it. But the question is: is it fact or fiction? I think it reads more like a short story than a nonfiction piece. But it is also as true as I can make it. A puzzle.

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