A Million Little Pieces James Frey

I'm not going to say I 'read' this book, when in reality there was at least as much skimming as reading, but who's asking? The reason I picked this book up in the first place was this article I think you sent me ages ago, Nik. I did some study on literary fraud as a student, and it's something I find pretty fascinating, especially when it comes to the strange, fact/fiction realm of biography. Pretending you, or your book, are something you're not is done, it seems to me, for one of two reasons: a) to denigrate the people you fraudulently represent, or b) to trade on their name/experience/situation and increase your sales. No, Helen Demidenko /Darvill/Dale or whatever it is you're calling yourself now - you do not do anyone any favours by representing them fraudulently.
So, in this article, when Frey said:

“Frankly, I don’t even care,” he says, exasperated. ... “I don’t care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book.It’s just a story. It’s just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I’ve broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it.”

I figured he fell into category b. I mean, I see his point - who cares? it's just a story - but I disagree. A Million Little Pieces is a good story, fact or fiction, but the writing is abominable. If I'd started this book, thinking it was true, and I was celebrating with this man, his journey through detox, I might be able to put aside the atrocious prose for the sake of the humanity of the whole thing. But if I'd struggled through the shit heap of unpunctuated garbage, thinking it was a memoir, only to discover it was just plain old bad writing, I would've been pissed too, Oprah.

The only reason you'd try to pass this off as memoir, you'd think, is to extract cash from bleeding heart redemption story lovers. And it worked - you were a bestseller - but your book is shit. I'm not saying your experience, whatever it might have been, wasn't an interesting story, but your book, James, was the badly written poetry of a stoned year 9 girl. I'll give you the Fury, young man! I can imagine the feeling of reading this thinking it was memoir and discovering later that, though the author may have, at one time, drank too much, the story was in fact, fiction, might have felt like the time I accidentally went to a Christian hip hop show: I knew I was going to see hip hop, but when, after the second track, there was no smacking up of bitches or pimping of rides, and it slowly dawned on my that I wasn't watching what I thought I was watching, I became outraged. Technically, it wasn't bad hip hop, but it wasn't what I wanted, or what I thought I'd be getting. I felt betrayed, and the only reason I can imagine they weren't explicit about the role their faith played in their music was so that fools like me would fork out for tickets, come, and possibly find my love of Hey Zeus. 'Fraid not.

Anyway, like I said: badly written, good story. And why does it matter? Because of a. Representing this book as a memoir denigrates people's real, lived experiences. The harm in letting people believe that stories like this are true when they aren't, is that this story misrepresents the experience of rehab, and makes real experiences look, unglossy, undignified, unexciting, unremarkable and dull. When in reality, I think I deserve a medal when I go a week without biting my nails. It's not glamourous, it's personal. People want to believe in redemptive stories like this (and why that is is another question altogether), and they are out there, but they're in The Big Issue, not in large advance book deals. And maybe it's too much to ask people to recover from this kind of thing, and then be honest, and eloquent, and media savvy, but then, maybe glorifying drug rehab is flawed in itself.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

What an odd little read this was….I loved and hated parts of it in equal measures. Loaned to me by someone who warned me that the author was much better at short stories than the full length shebang, I embarked with few expectations (the freedom of being loaned a book as opposed to shelling out your own hard-earned cash and thinking ‘This thing better be good’).

Main character Tassie is awkward and unworldly, but not unintelligent, when she moves from her family’s potato farm in the Midwest to attend college. She rooms with a girl who’s never home in a rundown part of town, and finds a job as a nanny for a couple who are about to adopt a child.

Something is a bit off about this couple from the start; he’s a lawyer who doesn’t attend the adoption appointments while she’s a chef who is prone to uncomfortable outbursts. Sarah Brink makes some high demands of Tassie, and flies her out with her to meet their baby, an African-American girl called Mary.

The book wants to be many things, and in zooming off in a million tangents, manages to leave many of its ambitions unfulfilled. But it’s an intriguing read nonetheless, even though it doesn’t quite pull it off. There’s Tassie and the weird couple with something to hide (revealed in a massive anti-climax, which is hugely disappointing since we’ve invested so much in it), a Muslim wannabe terrorist for a boyfriend, some really annoying characters posturing over how good they are for adopting black babies and a family member’s death in Afghanistan – which is all jam packed into the last third of the book. This means none of these worthy plotlines are going to get the full attention they deserve.

I’d describe it as a better than average coming of age tale; what elevates this book is the beautiful writing and Moore’s accurate portrayal of Tassie – who is just trying to fit in and figure out what the fuck the world is all about, with the adults around her giving her no clues. I’d be curious to read Moore’s short stories after this full-length effort almost gets there.

Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave

Ahh Penguin Classics. Bringing good stories to the people for under $10. I became aware of this book as it has been turned into a super successful play in recent years (which I haven’t seen but have heard great things about). It’s the true story of the author, a young gay man, and his relationship with the captain of school football team, at Xavier College in Melbourne in the 70s. Not only is John the footy captain, he’s Italian – so his parents go absolutely spare when he tells them he’s gay. Conigrave’s parents are slightly better, but one can imagine how being gay 30 years ago went down. These sections were infuriating in just how small minded people were (and to be honest, probably still are). For a parent to disown their own child based purely on their sexuality is just wrong and stupid.

John becomes a physio and Tim becomes an actor, getting in NIDA and moving to Sydney, where the two “take a break”, which involves Tim getting it on with loads of dudes. They get back together and end up both testing HIV-positive, which back in the day was helpfully known as ‘gay cancer’. The book candidly documents John’s struggle with the disease, as Tim looks after him and tries to block out his own impending sickness.

This book was published just before Conigrave’s death in 1994, but stops after John’s passing – I can’t imagine how heartbreaking it would be to watch your lover of years and years waste away, and also knowing that you had the same illness. It’s a pretty brave book in that it doesn’t gloss over anything, which had its confronting moments to read, but it’s a better book for it. It’s actually not all that well written, with Conigrave’s writing lacking any flourishes, but it has an authentic quality that was quite endearing, and I could see that its material would make for a brilliant play.

I think Conigrave wrote the book that he always wished existed when he was a young guy coming to grips with being gay; and luckily now for a generation of boys it does.

The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

I actually read this book right after Oscar Wao, and they were a little similar in topic (war-torn countries, dictators, snippets written in another language and colloquial references) but this one took itself a lot more seriously. Author Sabatini is from Zimbabwe where the novel is set, and it explores the nation’s identity struggle post-independence through the eyes of Lindiwe Bishop, who is witness to an event that shapes her entire life.

It’s a slow burner, which is a bad pun since the first pivotal moment is Lindiwe’s next door neighbour’s house burning down, killing a woman – teenage occupant Ian is the suspect of the arson that caused the death of his stepmother. It sets off a chain of events that tie Lindiwe to Ian, and the book charts their tumultuous relationship, and the breakdown of the country around them.

Lindiwe works hard to rise above her poor childhood to become university educated and is very aware of her colour and standing in society, while Ian, the white ‘Rhodesian’ wants to pretend the whole world is colour-blind; Lindiwe is constantly challenging him on her struggle to be recognised as equal (such as when they go camping together, and a group of white campers invite Ian to join them for drinks – and tell him he can bring his ‘girl’, or help, along – Ian does nothing to correct them) and the whole book revolves around both of them educating each other.

The period in which the book is set is hugely interesting to me; it’s a turning point in Africa where shit really started to go south. So this is watching it at the beginning, and the first signs of how awful Mugabe’s 30 year rule is going to be are showing.

There are some frustratingly slow moments, and Sabatini is a master of restraint, but sometimes I felt she held back too much with certain plotlines; I’m sure she meant to leave some aspects ambiguous but it meant that I wasn’t wholly satisfied by the end. However, a deserving winner of the Orange Award for New Writers in 2010.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

For some reason, I found the opening sentence of this book one of the most uninspired pieces of prose ever: “Lloyd shoves off the bedcovers and hurries to the front door in white underwear and blacks socks.” Perhaps I don’t like men named Lloyd (Lloyd Bysouth, you’ve scarred me, you primary school pervert). This is a book written by a journalist, which is always dubious; just because you smash out eight 250 word stories a day does mean you can write an awesome novel. And for a stretch, it’s set in the newsroom of an international newsroom in Rome…and what a surprise, the author worked as a correspondent in Rome! Where does this man get his ideas, you wonder in amazement?

The layout is kind of cute, with each new character and their job title introduced by way of a newspaper headline (example: U.S General Optimistic on War – Kathleen Solson, Editor-In-Chief) but the book is let down by what’s in the chapters; namely, some terrible writing. It really would have been better served as a collection of short stories, because with one or two character’s chapters, he really nails them, such as the satisfying set-up and reveal around Abbey Pinnola, the luckless in love chief financial officer, who is burned by an employee she fired – the book really lifts at this point but it’s too close to the end and nothing else is written that well. The men are all portrayed as hardened hacks, and the female chief of staff a total ballbreaker – no breakdown of stereotypes here. Which is a shame, because as a journalist, surely Rachman could have offered a more interesting perspective on his profession than this Year 12 quality offering.