The Story Of My Life -- No, Really

It's a line I've heard from every fiction writer I know -- upon witnessing some unlikely event or incredible coincidence, they'll say, "If I put that in a novel, no one would believe it."

I was reminded of this recently when a friend was telling me his theory that a certain popular memoir had begun life as a novel. There were too many things in it, he said, that struck him as, well, hard to believe.

He's not the only one making the charge against some recent nonfiction, particularly memoirs.

Author Judy Blunt, who won a Whiting Award for "Breaking Clean," her memoir about escaping with her three small children from what she described as a harsh situation on her husband's Montana ranch, admitted she made up a story about her father-in-law busting up her typewriter with a sledgehammer. The New York Times reported that other members of her family were also "shell-shocked" from stories in the book.

Even Blunt's "parents are reluctant to discuss the substance of her memoir," said the Times. "Her mother, Shirley, would say only, 'Judy sure has a way with words.'"

Another recent memoir questioned for truthfulness is that of journalist Kyle Spencer, "She's Gone Country: Dispatches From a Lost Soul in the Heart of Dixie." In a devastating review in the Winston-Salem Journal, critic Paul O'Connor points out that the book rests on the concept of New Yorker Spencer venturing into the "vast unknown" of the South to accept a job in Raleigh, North Carolina.

O'Connor says Spencer paints a nasty picture of the place as "a string of cliches complete with characters named Bo and people screaming 'hee haw.'"

But he also uncovers the fact that Spencer's premise was dishonest -- Raleigh wasn't new to her at all. She'd lived in neighboring Chapel Hill for years while earning her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina. "Spencer neglects to tell her readers this because such a revelation would undermine the thesis of the book," says O'Connor.

Perhaps even more significant is a revelation Spencer makes herself -- early in the book she refers to it as an "exaggerated memoir."

Hello?

And memoirs aren't the only trendy nonfiction books being questioned for honesty recently. Last week in the Raleigh News & Observer, book editor J. Peder Zane discussed his attempts to verify the truthfulness of one of the more popular books in the country right now -- "Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls," by Rachel Simmons. Thanks to appearances on "Oprah" and "Dateline NBC" and in numerous newspaper features, it's become a bestseller and helped to coin the name for the trendy new concept of "mean girls."

But Zane, the father of three young girls, noted that the voices of many of the young girls quoted in the book "are startlingly sophisticated. They possess a tremendous emotional and intellectual maturity, an incredible ability to observe their behavior objectively and the verbal skills to describe their actions and feelings lucidly." So he contacted the author through her publisher, Harcourt. Simmons offered to play him tapes of the "verbatim" quotes, and the two scheduled a time to do it.

Except then "A series of complications arose . . ." First Simmons cited "scheduling difficulties," says Zane. Then, she couldn't find her tape recorder. Then she had a migraine.

Zane never did get to hear those quotes.

So what gives in the world of nonfiction these days? Why is it leaning so close to -- maybe even into -- the world of fiction? And why don't they just call it fiction?

I like my friend's theory that some of these books started out as probably-not-very-good fiction. His idea was that, in any case, as novels coming from unknowns they would have been a case of "who cares?" for most New York editors. But call them memoirs, say -- something that happened to a real person -- and they become more interesting to an editor, especially given the current rage for the form.