Memoirs aren’t always “truthy” stories.
Using Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness,” keynote speaker Ben Yagoda analyzed the accuracy of autobiographies at the ACES banquet Saturday night.
“How ‘truthy’ does a memoir have to be?” said Yagoda, a professor of English and journalism at the University of Delaware and author of “Memoir: A History” and “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse.”
“To some extent it’s a facetious question, and to some extent it’s serious,” he said.
For Yagoda, that question arose in 2003, when recovered drug addict James Frey’s memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” turned out to be fabricated.
Some critics were shocked that a non-fiction book was not 100 percent true, while others suggested authors were free to make up personal memories, Yagoda said.
While working on his book “Memoir: A History,” Yagoda explored the origins of memoirs and the question of how factual one must be.
To determine the “truthiness” of a memoir, Yagoda developed a point system and charts to display memoir scores. Each memoir begins with 100 points and points are deducted for things such as poor writing style, taking jabs at people, factual inaccuracies and dialogue. An autobiography needs 65 points to pass.
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” scored a whopping 106 points, while Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” failed the “truthiness” test with 29 points.
The grading system got plenty of laughs from the ACES audience.
“I wasn’t quite expecting to talk about memoirs, but the chart was a fun way to look at them,” said Todd Kistler, a news editor for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group Inland Division. “It was definitely entertaining.”
Tammi Long, a technical editor for the Air Force Institute’s Space Power journal, agreed.
“I was very impressed with the presentation and (Yagoda’s) ability to keep us entertained and inform us at the same time,” she said.
While using charts and numbers to measure the accuracy of non-fiction writing may be fun and a bit facetious, it’s serious at the same time, Yagoda said.
“The people we encounter as we go about our lives are always telling us true stories,” he said. “No one comes up and says, ‘Yeah, I got a really cool fictional anecdote I want to tell you.”
Just like when listening to these people in everyday life, Yagoda suggests questioning the author’s insight, intelligence and credibility when reading a memoir. Perhaps, the author gets too intimate too soon, remembers too many details from the distant past or is just too funny, he said.
“There may be, and there probably are, hidden deceptions in these people’s tales, but we never find out what they are,” Yagoda said.
— Courtney Pitts, student, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
