Before I start reading a new memoir, I usually have to skim through a short disclaimer, lodged awkwardly between the title page and the dedication. I have a suspicion that these disclaimers began popping up after James Frey’s controversial and possibly untrue memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was slammed by Oprah Winfrey. “Some characters are actually composites of a few people,” these disclaimers generally read. “The order of some events may have been changed.” As far as the reader is concerned, it’s still a memoir. But if you’re a lawyer, the book could be fiction—there’s a disclaimer, isn’t there? Although these cautionary passages are present in most of the memoirs I read, they always bug me. If an author thinks that what he has written is the truth, and he wants to emboss the word “memoir” in gold ink on the front of his book, that’s enough information for me. As far as I’m concerned, using the word “memoir” means that we have an agreement: In the author’s eyes, this is his story. Whether it holds up in court is none of my business.
When I flipped through the copyright and title pages of Townie by Andres Dubus III, I was thrilled to see that it lacked a disclaimer of any kind. Although I regret that I’ve never read House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, or any other of Dubus’s respected and award-winning novels, I immediately trusted him. His memoir didn’t begin with an excuse, an explanation or a witty definition of what “truth” means to him. In fact, as I began to read, I realized that Dubus didn’t seem to care whether anyone was reading his book at all. Townie is the deeply personal exploration of one man’s violence, told not with rage, but with disarming vulnerability and wisdom. Dubus seems to tell this story not to sell books or gain notoriety, but to save his own troubled life. (more)
