Before I begin today's rant, a few random notes:

• Lest anyone think I am a horrible person who runs over cleaning ladies' plastic cars with no remorse, I did send my cleaning lady flowers yesterday afternoon. I haven't heard the verdict yet, but I do feel terrible about crunching her car with my apparently indestructible Explorer bumper.
• Little angel sleeping status update:  Well, let's just say I've ended up on her floor every night this week, but she has made startling progress in the "ability to fall back to sleep in her own bed with no cuddling" category.  She is going back to sleep in an average of ten minutes.  And that, my friends, is a victory in and of itself.  Next challenge:  NOT WAKING UP.
• I have registered for BlogHer!  I'm going with Jane and Cagey.  Terribly excited. 

Okay, on to the ranting.

What's up with this wah-wah over James Frey?  First, they decide his memoir is full of shit.  Then, Oprah calls in to Larry King and says, "Blah, blah, I'm Oprah and I say it's okay so shut up, American public."  Then the American public writes her a bunch of nasty e-mails, saying she has no heart and why doesn't she start clubbing with Martha Stewart already, and Oprah freaks out and grills old James on her show like she was Barbara Walters' evil twin.

My thoughts:

• "Memoir" is a loose term.  Anyone who has ever dabbled in creative writing knows that fiction is truth and truth is fiction.  It's called "poetic license."  I don't care who you are and what you saw - you will remember the EXACT SAME THING differently than another person who was there.  Yes, fabricating a story about having dental surgery without Novocain is probably stretching the limits of poetic license, but the whole "a memoir should be fact-checked" thing is going overboard, in my opinion. 

• "Truth" and "fiction" are relative.  Does everything I blog about actually happen?  Yes.  Do we say the EXACT SAME WORDS that I write?  Most of the time.  But sometimes, yes, it's true - sometimes writers remember things as they wish they happened, or in a wittier way than they actually did happen.  If we all sat around and wrote about our trip the grocery store exactly as it was, nobody would read it. (Well, I don't know if anyone reads it or not - TypePad stats have been down for a day and most of the people who come here were looking to buy ruby slippers on the cheap, but anyway, point still valid.)

• Good writing is good writing.  I read in that Yahoo story I linked to earlier in this post (for those of you unaware - they faintly gray words in my posts are links - I wish they would use a different color) that they are also now attacking Augusten Burroughs, who wrote Running with Scissors.  It's a book about a guy whose mother lets him live with her shrink and their insane family.  Was it all true?  Dude, if it is, it's amazing this guy is still alive.  Do you wonder if it's really true that a 13-year-old kid has an affair with a 30-year-old guy and nobody seems to think anything of it?  I'm thinking statutory rape, child molestation and some other nasty thoughts, but the way Burroughs writes it, it's easy to accept as feasible, if not morally correct.  The fact is that Burroughs is an amazing writer, a good storyteller, and for that, we should all read his book.  I haven't read his others, nor have I read Frey's, so I'll reserve judgment on those.  My point here is that people should read books because the storyteller is worth his weight in ink and royalties, not because they won't touch the pages unless they've been fact checked.

• Fact checking is for journalists. I was terribly disappointed in the Dan Rather debacle.  I don't believe in sensationalizing basic news stories, especially health stories designed to scare the shit out of America.  I especially think we need to be truthful in the areas of war (damn you to hell, W), children, health and heroism.  But if we fudge a little in the area of mainstream books, an area where adults have a choice as to what to read, not what they are depending on for a truthful and constitutionally  protected, unbiased view of the world, then let the reader beware.  Who is going around basing their lives on people's memoirs, anyway?  So different from deciding whether or not a drug is safe to give Grandma based on the latest reports in a medical journal.  SO DIFFERENT.

Okay, I'm off my soapbox now.  But I just couldn't handle it anymore.