Cake or Death Read Online Free

are how-to books for living. Why else would anyone write them or read them? Novels help you articulate the struggles of your own lifeand, at the very least, tell you what not to do. That Vronsky, he’s trouble, for instance.
    But biographies, autobiographies and memoirs are best of all. Stuff happened. Memoirs are infinite in their griefs and oddities and yet by definition (she lived to write the book), the author has survived. And they’re a grab bag. Yes, you have Eisenhower trying to decide which day would have the most favourable weather for the Normandy invasion. But his wartime lover, Kay Summersby, wrote equally interestingly about their awkward efforts to have sexual intercourse without anyone suspecting. She remembers her silk underthings, intended to entrance the general. They failed. He was impotent, presumably had weather on his mind.
    Great events and personal limpness, it’s all part of the memoir genre.
    That is why the scandal about that American, James Frey, trying very hard to have lived a shocking life, is significant. He wrote a memoir—which I shan’t bother to read—of my favourite kind. He was miserable and drug-addicted; lots of tooth loss and some of it by his own hands (or was that from a parody after the scandal?), wet black American freeway stuff, life on the grotty edge, plenty of skanks, jolly good. I enjoy curling up in a highly stuffed sofa under a blankie and reading about the sufferings of others. It isn’t that I take joy in it. But I’ve suffered, just like every other human, in my own special, dull way, and it comforts me to read that I am not alone, despite not having spent time in Japanese prisoner of war camps. And furthermore, they lived to tell the tale sothat’s all right then. No, I have never read
The Diary of Anne Frank
. I draw the line at the misery of children who didn’t survive to hide it from their own children.
    James Frey suffered mentally and physically. Apparently, he was torn, figuratively, into a million little pieces. Except he wasn’t. He made a lot of it up. And thus his agent, editor, publisher and, sadly, every reader of his novel has now learned not to quite trust anything in the memoir genre. This isn’t good, not only because people telling the truth about their lives has improved our own flawed lives and selves so much, but because readers will turn to fiction again. And 95 percent of North American fiction is unspeakably bad (75 percent for Brits), which destroys the capacity of reading in later life to compensate for appalling schools.
    Lies have increasingly snuck their way into autobiographies and memoirs (not biographies, for their accuracy is a biographer’s lifeblood. Or perhaps it’s more of a status thing.) The reason is what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness,” a satirical term referring to something known on a gut level, without evidence. The concept has little sway in the rest of the world. Frey can’t admit that he flat-out lied. He says he may not have told the facts as they were. But
he felt
them to be true. He didn’t tell his facts to you; he felt his facties at you. They were truthy. And that was good enough for him. I was puzzled by the number of people who defended Frey. Clearly truthiness plays a big part in their own arrangements.
    So I finally read Augusten Burroughs’s
Running with Scissors
, years after it was published but just after theFrey debacle. And for the first time, I couldn’t bring myself to believe all of it. After some research, I now accept that his mother was a mad narcissist and that she and her possibly-autistic alcoholic husband gave Augusten up for adoption to their psychiatrist, a man who masturbated to pictures of Golda Meir and handed little Augusten over to the pedophile who lived in a barn in the backyard.
    But I don’t accept that the doctor used to predict the progress of the day according to his own excrement and that one of his teenage daughters would willingly extract the