(January 23, 2006) — The controversy about the recent revelation that James Frey's best-selling memoir of alcohol and drug abuse — A Million Little Pieces — is more fiction than fact is both disingenuous and amusing. The popular genre of the contemporary memoir is a subspecies of what used to be called autobiography. One thing that we can count on is that all autobiographers stretch the truth. As Kafka knew, "In order to be able to confess, one tells lies."

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Rousseau, that is, used his imagination in turning his life into a story. This indeed is the place where autobiographers reside, as well as the mode in which they recollect their lives. As the great 20th-century memoirist Vladimir Nabokov knew, when memory speaks, imagination is always at work. The imaginative or fabulous dimension of autobiography is signaled in the early 19th century by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the most famous German writer, who called his autobiography From My Life: Poetry and Truth. Both naïve readers and literary sophisticates are suckers for the appeal of "real life," but, as Goethe knew, that appeal requires the resources of the imagination or "poetry" to bring inert and pedestrian facts to life.

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Stelzig is distinguished teaching professor of English, State University College at Geneseo.