Reality Hunger (10 page)

The only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire texts into this library. The reign of the copy is no match for the bias of technology. All new works will be born digital, and they will flow into the library as you might add more words to a long story. In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen
will prevail. On this screen, now visible to a billion people, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge.

We all need to begin figuring out how to tell a story for the cell phone. One thing I know: it’s not the same as telling a story for a full-length DVD.

It’s important for a writer to be cognizant of the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and more visceral narrative forms. You can work in these forms or use them or write about them or through them, but I don’t think it’s a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum. Culture, like science, moves forward. Art evolves.

Facts quicken, multiply, change shape, elude us, and bombard our lives with increasingly suspicious promises. The hybrid, shape-shifting, ambiguous nature of lyric essays makes a flowchart of our experiences of the world. No longer able to depend on canonical literature, we journey increasingly across boundaries, along borders, into fringes, and finally through our yearnings to quest, where only more questions are found; through our primal senses, where we record every wonder; through our own burning hearts, where we know better.

trials by google

I exaggerate.

I was on a train of lies and couldn’t jump off. You wonder how I could lie so fluently to you. That’s because at some level, I believed everything I was telling you. I believed I met him. I believed we met. I believed I knew his life better than any biographer, because I had imagined it.

Art is not truth; art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.

This chapter used to be called James Frey, but along came (at pretty much the same time) JT LeRoy, then Misha Defonseca, Margaret Seltzer, Herman Rosenblat. Similar phenomena keep arriving again and again, like the next scheduled
train. That million-dollar, career-exploding, trick-tease train of these so-called “misery lit” (also called “misery porn”) memoirs, first praised, then shamed, each taking its turn on the double-crested roller coaster of celebrity and infamy. This just in: Oprah Winfrey duped again! It’s become a national tradition, each fallout more engrossing than the book itself.

Identity has always been a fragile phenomenon.

I mean, I knew I’d never be the football star or the student council president and, you know, once people started saying I was the bad kid, I was like, “All right, they think I’m the bad kid. I’ll show them how bad I can be.”

No matter how ambiguous you try to make a story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, it’s a package made to travel. Not everything that happened is in my story—how could it be? Memory is selective; storytelling insists on itself. There is nothing in my story that did not happen. In its essence it is true, or a shade of true.