Читать книгу One Game at a Time. Why Sports Matter онлайн

37 страница из 41

Nasdijj, for example, wrote three acclaimed and awarded books, starting with 2000’s The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams, about growing up Navajo, his brutal childhood and abusive parents, eventually adopting an FAS kid, then an HIV+ child. Esquire reviewed it as an “authentic, important book.... Unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect.” Except it was a total lie. He’s a white guy from Michigan named Tim Barrus.

All these books claimed authenticity on the basis of suffering. Misery lit is a boom sector of the flailing publishing world, and from Frank McCourt to Dave Pelzer to Augusten Burroughs, offering up personal grief has made for good business, so it’s hardly any wonder that a few folks with less-than-traumatic lives have given it their best shot, reality notwithstanding.

It’s not just books either. Memoir is a fluid genre, and much of the hiphop I listen to is predicated on streetness. I love 50 Cent, but how would I feel if all his bravado and macho bullshit was a total lie? He got shot like I got shot but he ain’t fuckin’ breathing. I presume that thug rappers are habitually full of shit about their heroics, but at least I know it’s coming and love them for it. I don’t mind too much when my hiphop bleeds fiction and non-fiction a little: talking trash is part of the package. But I made no such deals with Frey before I read a Million Little Pieces and most everybody hates being lied to. Including Sherman Alexie, who isn’t real fond of Nasdijj either: “His lies matter because he has cynically co-opted as a literary style the very real suffering endured by generations of very real Indians because of very real injustices caused by very real American aggression that destroyed very real tribes.”9