J.L. Sutton's Reviews > My Friend Leonard

Should it matter if a memoir is truthful? By asking this question, I guess it’s safe to say I went into James Frey’s My Friend Leonard with some misgivings. The act of memoir writing inherently produces meaning, but that’s not the same as manufacturing meaning, not the same as finding events (which possibly didn’t happen) to fit a pre-determined story. What’s called truth may lie in a fuzzy area of the memoirist’s memory not always accessible as a complete emotional/visual record. That’s why memoirists often take repeated stabs at the same memory as they try to determine what really happened (and what it all meant).

I don’t really like the idea of ‘fact checking’ memoirists, but knowing big parts of a memoir have been intentionally falsified changes how I react to a work. When I read the opening about jail time (in Frey’s work) which readers now know didn’t happen, I decided to read this as a fictional memoir and see where it took me. It was engaging. Leonard, a larger-than-life father-figure looms over James’ life after he leaves rehab and is a presence until the very end. I thought it was written in a clear and compelling style. Still, calling it memoir made me wonder about the authenticity of people and events in the memoir (and made me question how vulnerable Frey had made himself by writing the memoir) even though I had decided not to worry about ‘truth.’ For now, I’m giving it three stars, but I’m still thinking…