A Million New Personas, Maybe a New Wild Query

This week news broke in the literary world of two “alleged” frauds. First was the announcement that the confessional memoir, "A Million Little Pieces" had been “shaped” to be more sensational, more in your face, more, shall we say outrageous that the true story. Oprah grabbed this book and ran with it, and it became a best seller. Memoir is a shape-shifting genre. Life, even a drug, drinking, promiscuous life, doesn’t necessarily come in three acts, and memoirists frequently add a bit here, subtract a bit there, kind of like body sculpting in print to make the story fit the story arc. How much one can outright lie, I have no idea.

The second jolt to the confessional scene was the “unmasking of JT Leroy.” According to Monday’s New York Times, he is a she and not a former truck stop prostitute and HIV positive novelist who stunned the literary establishment with the portrayal of his life, but a middle aged rock musician. Maybe. Who wrote the fictional fiction is still not established. We will know soon.

Now, anyone tapped into the literary culture, no matter how far out on the edge, knows that young, sexy, "damaged" writer will have a much easier time getting agented and published than a staid middle-aged writer. A pretty face, male or female, is a ticket to dine, to publish, and all that good stuff. Any celebrity with or without (usually with) a ghost writer can add a huge advance to his/her already substantial wealth and publish drivel while the midlist writers starve. This is a fact of American literary life.

But maybe, just maybe, Sucking It Up is not the only option.

Grapeshot was seized with an awful terrible but tempting idea. No longer a computer nerd, a suburban housewife, a white bread kind of woman who made Basque Garbure for dinner yesterday and then went to her writing group, Grapeshot could become an ageless rock and roll groupie, drugged, diseased, formerly drunken, anorexic, name-any-interesting-current-affliction. She could find a cute twenty-something ninety-eighty pound young lady to front for her. Throw a lot more sex, rock and roll, drugs and dementedness into her computer crime novels. Get an agent, a publisher and a huge advance.

She could publish. She could lie. She could make Saturday’s little episode of refusing a seat to the lame look like Sunday school.

I had a friend who jazzed up her biography with wild boar hunting in Mexico. Always been tempted. I mean, who would ever know? I am more of a hiking in the Berkshires person who heads for a nice restaurant for dinner, a plant-a-garden-feed-the-birds kind of person. For me, living dangerously is that third glass of wine. White bread. Suburban. Nice. BORING.

Still, the scientist in me will be awfully tempted to create two queries, and see which one gets the agent. The bad bad girl or the responsible good citizen. Which do you think would tempt the agent most?

We both know.

Grapeshot