Reality TV about Novelists?

By Laura Caldwell

For years, I used to mock reality TV. Then I started watching things like Top Chef and Project Runway, and I was hooked. This week, I saw The September Issue, a reality documentary about Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, which follows her and her posse as she shapes the September version of Vogue, their biggest issue annually. You wouldn't think that putting together a magazine would be that exciting , but the documentary makers did a great job. Which got me to thinking –why aren't there reality TV shows about novel writers?

Now, I know what you're thinking: novelists essentially sit in their pajamas, glaring at their laptops, muttering things like, "He wouldn't say that. Damn it!" or, "God, that is so freaking stupid," as they hit the delete button. But as novel writers, we have to do much more if we're lucky enough to be published and in the occasional public eye.

So here's what I see for a reality TV show featuring wannabe novelists: While the show is taping, the contestants would have to finish a novel (or at least a novella, a book of about 50,000 words). The prize is publication with a top publisher. As they're writing their books, the contestants engage in tasks many authors do if they are fortunate enough:

- Give press interviews, sometimes to a fabulous magazine, sometimes to a grocery store newspaper in Dickeyville, Wisconsin where the writer is a freshman journalism student at the local community college.

- Perform book readings and signings. The way I see it, contestants would have to do readings and author events at bookstores where: 1) two people show and they're both family members; 2) Seventy people show (hey, it happens to at all of us every once in a great, great while, and you have to use a different skill set); and 3) eight people show—four of which are your friends, two of which simply want directions to the books on colon cleansing, and two of which have stumbled over from the bar next store and begin heckling you.

- Appearing on local television where the host thinks your book, Burning the Map, is a novel about map burning, asking, “Isn’t that like flag burning? It's illegal in some countries, right?”

- Doing an overnight radio appearance where the host continually directs the conversation to the size of your breasts, (or if you're a guy, to the size of your ... whatever).

- Driving in a car for hours to a Midwestern town to speak at what is purportedly a mystery writer's conference, but where you are asked to sit on a panel about romance in the sci-fi genre. (This happens more often than you think).

The list could go on and on. There are so many things both glorious and humiliating that authors experience which are visual and don't just involve us mumbling in front of our computers. So what do you say, should we get our own show? And what would we name it? Top Author? Top Dude-Who- Works-For-Five-Years-On-a-Book-Only-To-Have-3,253-People-Read-It-In-Hardcover? Whatever we call it, I’d watch it, would you?

And then he put a gun into my mouth and I

My new novel, Bleeding Kansas, purports to be set in the part of Kansas where I grew up. I've provided photographs of"my childhood home"and of me with my "brothers." The truth is, I was raised by space aliens, who assumed human form only during the day; at night they committed such bizarre and unusual acts that even fiction, let alone the memoir could not do them justice. I thought it would be more credible to create a middle-America background.

The fake memoir is not new, but it is a compelling part of the contemporary cultural landscape. The most recent to be unmasked: Margaret Jones, who traded her affluent LA upbringing in for a childhood spent among the gangs in South Central LA (Love and Consequences, Riverhead). Kakutani herself reviewed it glowingly in the Times two weeks ago, although she said "...some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times." Turns out, because they were a novel. (the review was so glowing that Jones's real-life sister outed her. Talk about sibling rivalry. Fortunately my birth family are still on the planet Zorg, no danger there.)

And then there's the Belgian, Misha Defonseca, whose harrowing memoir of the Shoah includes being raised by wolves in the French forest--translated into 18 languages, made into a French film.

James Frey seems pretty benign compared to Defonseca's abrogation of one of the most dehumanizing, suffocating episodes in human history.

I used to think writing was the process of turning emotional experience into stories so that you could make sense of it, and perhaps help others to make sense of their own lives. But it almost seems as though we are so remote now from real experience that we prefer the ersatz, we need it to be shocking--let there be lots of rape, crack, prison guards, let's get down into it with both hands and cover ourselves in it. And then walk away to the next faux thrill. I'm not putting this very well; it isn't quite clear to me. But what happened to traveling much in Concord?