about the allegations surrounding frey (and non-fiction truth-bending in general)

More than anything, I'm upset by how much attention is being given to this, when there are much worse and more fatal lies being told in the world these days.

Yeah, according to thesmokinggun.com, he pitched it to something like 11 diff. agencies, all of whom rejected him, so then he tried the memoir angle, and suddenly people loved it.

(b) Most of the creative liberties taken in memoirs are still pretty distinct from fabrication, and they tend to be more about the mechanics of the book than the contents within. You might play with your timeline to create a better narrative arc; you might make mild space-saving composites of conversations or minor characters; you might present an experience in explicitly subjective terms. Overuse of these things can create gray areas, but it's still pretty easy to tell the difference between creative overreaching and an active attempt to fool people.

(c) The reason stuff like this gets picked up as memoir isn't just down to the popularity of memoirs as genre; it also has to do with the genres having different demands. People who think their lives are interesting aren't necessarily good writers, and they don't necessarily know a lot about the usual mechanics of novels, and when they sit down and write the product often lacks all the stuff we expect from novels -- purposeful narrative arc, carefully arranged symbolism, formal interest, a well-used sense of artifice. The product isn't good as a novel. What it might have, though, is an interesting real-world story to tell, with a good real-world voice behind it, and everyday non-art advice to offer -- i.e., the things plenty of people are looking for in memoir. They're completely different formats with completely different demands, and it's quite possible to write something that's great in one field and not in the othe -- the same way that good painting and good photography are just not the same thing.

Watching this Frey flap has creeped me out by revealing once again how many people think of the two things as interchangeable -- as if fiction and memoir are the same thing, only one's true and one isn't. Pop culture has a lot to do with this, since the common conception of The Writer nearly everywhere is as a person who funnels his/her interesting life into fiction; the idea seems to be that all fiction is thinly veiled memoir, except for genre books and stuff published before 1900.

In his book Cynicism and Postmodernity, Timothy Bewes maintains that the phenomenon of sincerity is one of the cultural obsessions of our time. At the beginning of the 1990s, the media, measuring the pulse of the market and picking up a longing for semantic transparency, repackaged the postmodern zeitgeist as the age of honesty. Thus, concludes Bewes, "sincerity has replaced wit and subtlety as the mark of commercial credibility."....

As an occasional literature professor, I was at first touched by the naive concern of my students to know whether what was described in some work of literature really happened or whether it was just invented. Among many of them I detected a lack of understanding of the fundamental assumptions of a literary text, an inability to differentiate literary strategies and narrative masks, and a deafness to irony — either they did not understand it, or they considered it morally, politically, fundamentally unacceptable. Then I noticed a reaction which Bewes defines as "a gastric aversion to the cultural products of postmodernism," even a basic aversion to texts which demand effort in their reading and which are, therefore, not "sincere."

Now, some years later, if I look around me, I see that I am buried under cultural products which represent the same values that my students advocated. My surroundings are dominated by the culture of public confession, where the television has taken over the role of the church, and the role of church confessors is played by popular TV presenters. Memoirs are no longer reserved for those who have climbed the Himalayas or swum the Atlantic. On the contrary, what is valued are the ordinary accounts of ordinary people about ordinary things. The market is swamped with products which claim reality — from soap operas, which people believe more than life itself, to real-life stories, which people believe as much as soap operas. In the culture of public confession, everyone has acquired the right to his personal fifteen minutes, just as Andy Warhol predicted. The only thing that puzzles me, in this ardent return to reality, is reality itself.

That is, the reality so aggressively offered to me as authentic is in fact soapified reality, a kind of "life for beginners"....

via Maud Newton

Why don't more people think of this? Silly of them.

But what I want to know is, does the same technique work for bolding, only with b's instead of i's?

Well, I think you're right that there's also a prurient angle, and perhaps that's even the dominant factor, the desire to read about people misbehaving and doing naughty things in graphic detail - and perhaps the confessional/redemptive angle is just a way to whitewash that motive and make it seem noble - ie., to read something for its supposed inspirational properties rather than its titillating ones.