The Memoir Problem

“No one wants to read an 8,000-page memoir that pores over each waking moment. But now, the controversy surrounding James Frey’s bestselling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” is raising questions about how factual even the most carefully written memoirs are. The memoir is a strange kind of performance. It’s halfway between fiction and testimony. ‘Anybody in his right mind knows that a memoir is unreliable’.”