Mike Daisey as Odalisque

Renoir's Odalisque...
reminds me of lies dressing up as "larger truth"  
Paste Mike Daisey's face there

Mike Daisey, New York actor/monologuist and self-appointed crusader against Apple, Inc., is so in love with his own messianic importance that he will brook nothing standing in the way of his message. Not his Chinese interpreter. Not Ira Glass. Not even his own rhetoric.

Does he remember this interview he gave at the time of his flamboyant photo opp turning in of the petitions against Apple?

 Mr. Daisey called Apple "terribly arrogant" in its PR response to the growing concerns. "Its brand is in serious jeopardy now," Mr. Daisey said. "Apple's greatest asset is their brand, and it does not take very long for a brand to be tainted. When I think of Nike even today, the second or third thing I think of are sweatshops."

Mike Daisey, I know you still don't get it. Maybe you can understand it, finally, if you use your most valued treasure, that would be your own hallowed words.  Your brand is in serious jeopardy now. You have been 'terribly arrogant.'  It does not take long for Truth to be 'tainted.'  And nothing does so quicker than lies.

In this post, I wrote about Daisey's monstrous labyrinth of self-aggrandizing justifications. I promised to give the more gentle version today. Because I have had this conversation before, with someone I respected vastly more than I could ever respect Mike I'm-the-Most-Fabulous-Fabulist Daisey.  In 2006, novelist Susan Henderson and I engaged in a thought-provoking dialogue about truth. We were each incensed at that time by the spectacle of A Million Little Lies imploding on James Frey.  However, we looked at it from opposite sides. It was at that time that I was first introduced to the concept of lying for art's sake and that otherwise ethical people could sanction this practice. I tried at that time to understand their point of view and to speak in their own language.

Here now I reprint my own essay which first appeared on Susan Henderson's website in 2006. Susan has gone on to win fantastic accolades and awards for her novel UP FROM THE BLUE.  She has given me permission to re-post her original essay here as well. She gives the caveat, "...(just make it clear it's something I wrote in 2006 because who knows if I still agree with myself). I do think it's a fascinating argument and am glad you're stepping back into that conversation."

Here below is my original essay. Hers is in the next post. In 2006, hers appeared first. If you'd like to read it in that order, just click here.
______________________________

Dear Susan,

Thanks for posting your blog link at (original site).  I'm quite interested in this subject myself. So much so I'll be appearing on a local radio show in a major market tonight to comment on the Frey mess. 

For me, there's a very easy answer to your question about the prom dress story. The prom dress with the "lemon" bow.  I would absolutely call it fiction, fiction "based on a true story," if you like.  I would find it a big misrepresentation to call it non-fiction or even memoir. Easy call for me.

But obviously not an easy call for you.

And, causing me great consternation, I learned yesterday it would not be an easy call for my agent, either. 

I am quite positive my agent is a more ethical person than I am. She's just lovely and makes me feel a little grimy in comparison. So how could I find myself stomping around indignantly on the moral high ground while she lolled about like an Odalisque in the dreamy linens of artifice?

Why doesn't untruth scratch and chafe her the way it does me?  Scratch and chafe? Forget it. It strangles and sears.

As we talked, both gingerly exploring this moment of unexpected division, the only answer that presented itself to either one of us was our footing in different professions.  "You're a journalist," she pronounced early on.  "You're grounded in publishing," I said later. 

But that evening I had another extended conversation on the topic, this time with a layperson. "Lay" vis a vis both publishing and journalism.  In other words, a regular person, a normal person, a person who reads board books to her four year old and writes "honey-do" lists for her husband.  I felt a rush of delicious righteousness as she poured forth her own indignation on the whole memoir/Frey/Talese mess.  Must be sure to include Talese, because, while my layperson easily felt great contempt for James Frey, she was also appalled by "that publisher lady" on Oprah's couch. 

 It was her outrage that fueled this conversation, not mine, I gloated to see.   

This, I thought as she boiled over, is the key. Those in publishing, including my shining madonna of an agent who identified strongly with "that publisher lady", may have a valid position.  But it's a position with a large disconnect from the rest of us.  Perhaps it is well understood, within publishing circles, that memoir occupies the vivid and idealized chamber of the sultan's girl, the Odalisque.  But the rest of us expect the girl really is that pretty and the sheets are always satin.  We thought you sold us a photograph, not a spectacularly imagined painting.  We might like to buy the painting some time, but, really, we need to know first.

As for the prom dress with the lemon bow, my position is that you, the writer, need to find the rhythm in truth. It's a harder job.  "Pink" does not, very true, have the same lilt as "lemon."   As a reader, I want you to keep tapping at the keys till you find "rosebud" or "candy blossom" or "strawberry." Or till you dig deeper, ditch the bow altogether, and find truth and rhythm co-existing in the tatting or taffeta or tulle.

If you want to label it non-fiction, that is. 

If you want me to experience certain feelings about the narrator and call it memoir, I want you to bring me into those school days where the plain girl lashed out and struck back.  It's too big a portion of the truth to leave it out.  I want you to find there the candy-blossom rhythms that get your point across.  That's your job as a memoirist, as a writer, as a purveyor of truths, emotional and "essential."

As a consumer of well-crafted words, a person who buys the labor of gifted thinkers, I love the lemon bow story.  I don't need to have it slithering in as non-fiction where it doesn't belong.  Knowing that it is based on some actual experiences of the author gives it extra pique. But calling it actual, historical truth when, it fact, it deviates so much makes me feel separated from the writer because now I see the writer doesn't trust me and doesn't respect me and I want to walk away from it.

In fact, it makes me think, after all, Odalisque is just a whore.

Thanks for being part of this important conversation and posting the lemon bow story with its insertions.  It really helped me force my own thoughts to focus as well as understand the memoirist's viewpoint and struggle.  And, of course, I did enjoy the story very much on its own merits (as a story!) and the entire thoughtful post.
____________________


That's how I wrote it in 2006.  For Susan's original essay, click here. For my 2012 "brutal truths" version, click here.  Too bad I don't have a cartoonist on staff. I would love to see Mike Daisey's face pasted on Renoir's Odalisque up there.  Come on, sailor, true love, really really!

(click on a title below to buy)

Camille Kimball's books:

**What She Always Wanted** as seen on TV!

                 **A Sudden Shot** as seen on TV!

        The Mammoth Book of Tough Guys

Coming soon: Masters of True Crime-Chilling Stories of Murder and the Macabre

Thoughts on this or any article at this site? To the next person whose comment I use for a post I will send a free signed book!  (If you post as "anonymous" for convenience, try to include an identifying website or name in your remark so no one else can claim your prize!)  For an example, please click here.

"Facts or Truth?" -- Mike Daisey, Apple, Foxconn

  

Mike Daisey doesn't trust you to make your own moral judgments. So he's going to make them for you. And for his trouble he gets to feel very self-righteous. Not to mention cash some very nice checks.

That's what I'd say if I wanted to tell "brutal truths--brutally." Oh, that's Daisey's own description of his brand of entertainment. Turns out, his "brutal truths" aren't so much "truth" as they are "what Mike Daisey wants you to believe so he can manipulate you."

Mike Daisey, in case you haven't heard, is the New York actor or "monologuist" who convinced the world of the bona fide mwhahaha wickedness of Apple and its manufacturing partner, Foxconn.  Then was caught lying about many of the material details of his presentation.

After eeking out a scrawny underfed apology "to anyone who felt betrayed," Daisey is now painting himself the victim. Public Radio was mean to him. Journalists are mean to him. Nobody's paying attention to the big bad Apple/Foxconn story anymore!  


Hey, Mike! Ya think?!

Mike Daisey press kit photo

Most of us learn the story of the boy who cried wolf somewhere around 3 or 4 years old. By the time we're teenagers, we've internalized its message and learned that NO ONE LIKES TO BE LIED TO.  In Daisey's twisted world, his lies are necessary to get people to hate what he hates (Villain Apple and Villain Foxconn).  He figures we won't hate his favorite Big Baddies unless he makes them out worse than they are.

Guess what, Mike? That's our prerogative. Conditions at Foxconn as truthfully reported by far more reliable sources than Daisey or the sadly discredited THIS AMERICAN LIFE show,* may just be lousy enough to get our attention. Or not. I only have so much moral outrage to expend upon this world and I get to choose where. You, Mike Daisey, do not get to fool me into moving your personal pet project up my priority list because you have "art" on your side. You do NOT have art on your side. You have your own ego and your own bank account on your side.

There's also a book making the rounds lately, THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT, that makes a similar argument that "storytelling" endows the right to ginger up the facts in order to make a better story. I was annoyed in the extreme when I read about this book and I gleefully give a spoiler here--

 Much of the book is taken up with emails written back and forth between a fact checker and the principal author, arguing over an article the one had submitted to a magazine employing the other. Turns out these emails are fiction, too!  But they don't tell you until the end of the book, you're supposed to be believing all along that this discussion happened in real time and the genuine emails have been "re-printed" in the book. They spring a "gotcha" on you at the end. You haven't been reading the philosophical discussion of two professionals as they struggled over Project A. You've been reading the collaborated fiction of two hacks concocting dialogue for Project B.

You're not talking about "storytelling" anymore, fellas. You're just plain telling stories.  Ask any first grade teacher what the difference is. So when the wolf really does come, as may or may not be happening in a Foxconn factory right now, all us irritated villagers turn our backs and go harrumph, we've heard that one before.

This topic is of paramount interest to me as a human being who doesn't want to be lied to, first and foremost. But as a professional journalist and non-fiction writer, I feel I can't leave my position unspoken.  My books are documented within an inch of their lives. There are detailed footnotes on many, many pages in each. Portions are written in first person and if I say I witnessed something, you can bank on it. Usually there are other witnesses to corroborate my observations. And, unlike Mike Daisey who "lost" his interpreter's phone number and called her "Anna" instead of "Cathy" when asked for corroboration by This American Life's Ira Glass, my information can be checked against real names and documents.  Click through to these posts and check them against this photo

Audio recorder plainly visible to Marjorie, Camille

--you'll see I carry a tape recorder to my interviews. If I can't corroborate with witnesses, documents, photos or recordings, I have to act as if it didn't happen when it comes to writing it up. That means there are actually MORE facts I could tell you but won't. That is the opposite of Mike Daisey's philosophy. I give you, the reader, what I absolutely am able to back up and let you decide how interesting or convincing it is. It is NOT my right to recruit you into an opinion you might not have arrived at on your own given the real facts.

It seems that Daisey gave a speech at Georgetown on Monday night to a packed audience. He gave an aggressive defense of his lying. On his own website, he whines away that he's being compared to other notorious liars like Jayson Blair, James Frey and Greg Mortenson. Geez, Mike, what's so bad about being called a liar if lying is, you know, such a great defensible thing?

Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple reports he interviewed a young woman who attended Daisey's Georgetown performance. She had arrived feeling"betrayed" but after listening to the actor's passionate excuses, had swung back to his side because he got her thinking about where the real importance is, with "the facts or the truth?"

My stomach turned when I read the end of Wemple's piece. This is the power of a gifted orator. He can have an otherwise moral and intelligent person so muddled they can make a statement like that.

Dear Young Woman at Georgetown--"Facts" and "truth" are the same thing. The truth is Mike Daisey is a liar, both proven and admitted. The facts are that Mike Daisey made a lucrative career selling information that he knew to be inaccurate for the express purpose of causing harm to Apple.

In some places, such as the occasional (ok, every) lawbook, we also call that libel, even fraud. That's not art. It's a con. I do not believe he did it out of his altruistic soul, I feel it's more likely he was motivated by the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd.

And the cha-ching of the box office.

That's what I would say if I was to write a "brutal truth--brutally." But as a matter of fact, I have had this conversation before and it involved one of the names that's listed above and causing poor Mike Daisey such chafing right now, James Frey. In 2006, I was gentle and decidedly not brutal.

Because this is an important topic that is so central to my work as a journalist and non-fiction writer, I am going to repost that discussion next.

*Kudos to Ira Glass for his honest and real apology. As an experienced producer, I feel for the position he ended up in. How could he guess a colleague would flat out lie like that? But he manned up to the bar and apologized because his show was wrong. Period. Not just to those who "might" have felt betrayed.

(click on a title below to buy)

Camille Kimball's books:

**What She Always Wanted** as seen on TV!

                 **A Sudden Shot** as seen on TV!

        The Mammoth Book of Tough Guys

Coming soon: Masters of True Crime-Chilling Stories of Murder and the Macabre

Thoughts on this or any article at this site? To the next person whose comment I use for a post I will send a free signed book!  (If you post as "anonymous" for convenience, try to include an identifying website or name in your remark so no one else can claim your prize!)  For an example, please click here.