The Fudge Factor

I like fudge. Love it, actually. Except when it comes in book form.

You know what I'm talking about: memoirs and nonfiction narratives that go off recipe, adding funky ingredients like compressed time frames, characters who don't exist in real life and out-and-out lies.

I read Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors many years ago, and, while I enjoyed the book, I had a feeling that there was no way everything in the book could be true. I wondered how Burroughs could recall entire conversations in their entirety. Events seemed too contrived.

Yes, I know he relied heavily on the memoirist's favorite tool, the dog-eared and yellowed journals of youth.

Burroughs maintains the book is 100% accurate, despite settling a lawsuit filed by the family with whom he lived during part of his childhood, claiming that the author had made things up in the book.

I have no idea where the truth lies (how's that for putting two words together?), and will grant that Burroughs is free to recall events of his childhood as he sees fit. While he agreed to call his work a "book" instead of a "memoir" in the author's note, he says he didn't change a word.

On the Fudge Factor scale I'll give Burroughs a 3 and the benefit of the doubt.

The scale ranges from 1 (just a smidge) to 10 (James Frey).

I haven't read Frey, so I can't review his books, but I think we all know that his attempts at memoir writing were dipped in a whole lotta fudge.

I also haven't read Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. This is the book that Aaron Sorkin turned into the screenplay for "The Social Network," and for which the screenwriter won an Oscar.

I have, however, read Mezrich's first nonfiction work, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.

Mezrich was brought to task for that book by the very people he chronicled. According to an article in the Boston Globe from June 25, 2009, several MIT grads who were part of the crew that took on Vegas, "found much of their tale unrecognizable."

Mezrich faced the same criticism for his Facebook story. An article in the New York Times from July 19, 2009, refers to The Accidental Billionaires as "nonfictionish."

I liked "The Social Network," but couldn't help wondering while watching, "How much of this is made up?" I realize that screenplays are different than books. But can Mezrich be happy knowing that people watching the movie based on his book are sitting there wondering what's real and what's fantasy?

Obviously he doesn't care. This is what he does. And for his efforts, I'm giving him a Fudge Factor of 7.

Why do I care?

I wrote a book that's a memoir/fiction hybrid. But I've never called it anything other than a collection of short stories ((C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity). Truth be told, however, for a while the book's working subtitle was "True Stories About Real Things That May or May Not Have Happened."

But that was just for fun.

I get angry when writers lie to me. I don't like it when they are greedy, deciding that in order to sell more books they need to make stuff up, rather than just tell people what happened. Truth is stranger than fiction, yet somehow too many authors get confused when working on nonfiction books, and think they need to get creative, instead of just telling their story.

I could've tried to pass my book off as a nonfiction work. Memoirs are hot these days. Many of the characters in the book are based on real people. Many of the events that take place actually happened. One of my friends who is portrayed in the book told me that he can't recall exactly which stuff in there is true and which is made up.

Even I can't remember sometimes exactly what happened in real life, and which stuff I cooked up. But I'm not interested in selling you fudge.