Like many college students, most of my knowledge of current events is gleaned from the headlines on the New York Times website, the first ten minutes of the Daily Show and, of course, NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics (newsflash: despite the fact that the women wear next to nothing and are often thrown bodily onto the ice by their bumbling partners, ice dancing is really boring!). For those of you who are as behind on the news as I am, a recap of some recent stories: the Vice President of the United States has gunned down an elderly man in an apparent effort to compensate for his lack of military service, the Danish butter cookie industry has been dealt a crippling blow by a Muslim boycott (their loss — who doesn’t love Danish butter cookies?), and everyone’s favorite no-nonsense talk show host, Oprah Winfrey, has been leading a campaign against James Frey for publishing a largely fabricated memoir.

I can understand peppering 78-year-old men in the face with birdshot and burning down consulates to protest accusations of being violent, but, frankly, Oprah’s one-blowhard crusade has left me scratching my head. Memoirs aren’t exactly a genre known for their accuracy, nor should they be; who wants to read about a person’s actual, mundane life, replete with poor comedic timing, esprit d’escalier, small dreams and big disappointments? The “true” anecdotes we share with others would, without a bit of poetic license, be boring beyond belief. In the retelling, the situation becomes just a little more dramatic; we become just a little wittier; ensuing hijinks become just a little zanier. As David Sedaris, the queen of the entertaining memoir, once said, “When people ask me if these stories are true, I prefer to say that they are true enough.”
So I don’t really care that Frey lied about the veracity of his novel — in fact, I wish more authors would follow suit. I don’t have a problem with people making things up and claiming they happened; I have a problem with people making things up and claiming they didn’t happen.

Let me explain. I have, for a while now, been unable to really enjoy fiction. This likely stems from my rather poor decision to take a creative writing class in high school as part of my senior-year curriculum. The first half of the year was spent writing poetry, which was easy enough; you just took a sentence, removed the punctuation, replaced every noun with an overwrought metaphor, and added line breaks wherever you pleased.

But the second half of the year was spent on fiction writing, which was a lot harder to fake. I was absolutely terrible at making up stories (I had an imagination deficit) and I felt dumb just writing down the actual events of my life. It soon became apparent, however, that this was the protocol for the class; everyone unabashedly took the events of their own lives — a messy breakup, the death of a loved one, a struggle with one’s cultural heritage — and changed the names, occasionally modifying the outcomes to align with the way they wished things were. The goal was not to invent new concepts, but to reinvent old ones and pretend that they weren’t the embarrassing truth.

I believe that this class was directly responsible for my subsequent loss of interest in fiction, not for the obvious reason — reading story after poorly-written story about goodbye sex with ex-significant others whom the author would “never, ever stop loving” — but because I became too immersed in the procedural aspects of writing. Four years of textual analysis in college, studying the paradigms and syntagms of storytelling and the politics of speaker’s intent, only made my focus on production more instinctive. When I read a work of fiction now, I don’t imagine the experiences of the narrator; I imagine the experiences of the author, extracting and shaping her own life into that of a character with a different name and background. I analyze the story arc, looking for familiar structural elements: the unexpected setback, the love story, the plot twist, the denouement. I’m too distracted by the meta-content to become absorbed in the actual content, and the pretense of the author’s detachment — her implicit assertion that the story’s narrator is not herself — can even be irritating.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to authors. They do, after all, invent characters they’ve never met and plots they’ve never witnessed. But it is impossible to create something truly new and independent of one’s experiences; just as an artist’s original drawing is made up of the same lines and curves and colors as every drawing before it, the people and things that even the most creative among us imagine are reconstructed from a pool of character traits, mannerisms, and emotions that we have already observed. The difference between the artist and the fiction writer is that the artist presents her art as her own portrayal of the world seen through her own eyes, while the fiction writer attributes her thoughts and dreams to a character who doesn’t exist.

Frey wrote something that people have found dramatic, heartrending, and uplifting, but because it’s written in the first person and its truth (or lack thereof) was challenged by an investigative website rather than the author himself, people feel betrayed. But I would like to say thank you, Mr. Frey. Thank you for imagining yourself more interesting than you really are, for writing a story about the things you wish had happened, and for having the courage to reveal who you’re really writing about: yourself.