I have not had any interest at all in reading Jim Frey's sensation, A Million Little Pieces, even after Oprah started gushing like mad about it. (And I love Oprah, but I have no clue what she was thinking here.) All the fallout from The Smoking Gun's expose is very interesting to consider, especially since everyone is talking about it, but I have to wonder just how so many readers could have believed this was all true. If the guy really was that strung out, should we expect him to have remembered his life clearly enough to write a memoir years later? Heck, if I hadn't written it down I could not tell you my son's first word and he's only 4 years old - trying to recall entire conversations from ages ago seems like an impossibility.

And I wasn't stoned during any of this period either.

I favor memoirs that are more like recollections - that don't attempt conversation or ironclad facts and more often take on a "we always had a great time playing hockey" or "my grandfather loved to make strawberry wine" attitude - basically recollections of generalities that create a flavor of a time and a place and a group of characters. Here's an example, from George Howe Colt's The Big House:

"In October 1966, five months after the birth of my cousin Russell, Sandy came down with a cold and a low-grade fever she couldn't shake. Like most proper Bostonians, she didn't believe in getting sick, and resisted Sidney's attempts to get her to a doctor. Finally, she agreed to go in for a checkup. The doctor told Sidney that his wife had acute granulocytic leukemia. She might surivive several years; she might die within days.

There began a siege whose extent I would not learn until six years later, when Sidney wrote a memoir of the ordeal. An essential part of that siege was silence; we children were never told the truth, and neither was Sandy."

Two important things here - first that the episode is dated by Russell's birth, (Sandy's son), making it easy to remember just when she was diagnosed, and second that Sidney wrote a memoir about his wife's illness which could be used by Colt as much needed reference. But still - he writes in generalities about things you would remember, even if you were a child. They were never told, she was never told, and, later, the phone call to his father about his sister's death. There are no conversations, no fake moments. This is honest recollection and it is a beauty to read.

Along with Colt's wonderful book about his family's summer house (and his attempt to save it), I also love Kate Whouley's Cottage for Sale, Julie Powell's Julie & Julia, Steve Almond's Candy Freak and the classics: Helen Beardsley's Who Gets the Drumstick and the Gilbreth siblings" Cheaper by the Dozen.

Whouley decided to move a cottage in Cape Cod and attach it to her small home. She has a lot of conversations with contractors and movers and that sort of thing, but since she has all the bills and faxes and memos (as well as photos) to back it up, her ability to stay close to the truth is fairly obvious. And although she does not admit this in the book, as Whouley is a writer I can't help but think that she was keeping track of things with the idea of at least a future article or two based on the cottage purchase and thus maintained copious notes or a journal during the endeavor.

Powell has folks who seem to love that she got a book deal out of blogging and those that seem to hate it, but I thought her book was funny and sweet and her idea of cooking her way through Julia Child's classic a brilliant thing to try. (No way in hell I would do it, but it still makes for fun reading.) She had a year's worth of blog entries to jog her memory though, so it's easy to see how she wrote this book. Most of the conversations take place with her husband and while they might not be word for word exact, it's pretty easy to know what you would be saying to each other when you found maggots under the dish drainer - at least I know what we would be saying around here.....

So no crushing doubts on the honesty of that title!

Almond's book about his love of candy is very general in terms of his childhood - those kind of hazy thoughts that we all could easily call to mind about what we liked and hated as kids, the food that gave us comfort, our favorite candy bars. The rest of the book is written as he visits various candy factories around the country - something he did while he was writing the book and thus actively taking notes. So the memoir bit here is actually secondary to the story about America's candy business. He just does such a good job with the memoir bits that they fit in seamlessly, and give the rest of the book that much more sincerity.

As for the two classics - both have lots of conversation but it still sounds more general than anything else. (From Cheaper by the Dozen: " 'Mind what Grandma says and wear these all the time," she told us. "Now if you bring home a cold it will be your own blessed fault, and I'll skin you alive.' Grandma always was threatening to skin someone alive, or draw and quarter him, or scalp him like a red Indian, or spank him till his bottom blistered.") The conversations are written based on facts they remember about the people, and thus while they may not be word for word correct, they are believable because they correctly convey the voice of the characters.

(I could write that my grandmother asked me to sit down on a certain day for "a cuppa" and it might not have been true for that day, but she was always making tea for us, so it was probably true or at least generally true.)

Beardsley does the same thing in Who Gets the Drumstick (the story of the real Yours, Mine & Oursfamily) and has the added benefit of being able to rely on newspaper interviews and magazine stories that were written about the combined family over the years. Does she know for sure which child spoke up first about whether or not she should date Frank Beardsley? I doubt it - but as the comments are obvious and not sensational, it doesn't really matter and the odds are good that she does remember exactly what was said when she got pregnant again with baby #19 and exactly what her nighttime cravings were. (For the record I do remember eating my husband's homeade fudge the last week before my son was born. He showed up 9 days overdue and by then I was living off of chocolate - good eating be damned!)

My point in all of this is that buyer beware - if it sounds too impossible to be true then odds are that it is. That doesn't mean there haven't been millions of people with extraordinary lives, but if they recall conversations word from word over a period of ten years, or of if they don't seem to peg dates down at all for unusual life moments then warning bells should be going off in the heads of publishers (and readers). Why Oprah fell for this, I will never know but it will be interesting to see if she addresses the issue. As for me, my book is fiction and it is staying that way although it is 100% based on true events. I just can't recall it perfectly enough to make it nonfiction, and I'm not willing to put it out there (although I have been asked to do so) as a nonfiction book.