Stranger than fiction — lessons to be learned from real-life tall tales

Won’t you come into my parlour?” said the spider to the fly.

The spider was Joe Duffy. The fly was Kathy O’Beirne, whose book, Kathy’s Story, is an international Mis-Lit bestseller. Mis-Lit, short for Miserable Literature, consists mainly of accounts of God-awful childhoods.

Think Nuala O’Faolain’s first book. Think Paddy Doyle’s ‘The God Squad’.

(And if you haven’t read it, you don’t know what you’re missing.) On radio last week, Joe “Spider” Duffy marvelled softly about the sales of Kathy’s Story. Kathy O’Beirne talked about her years in Magdalen laundries, her father’s abuse, the child she had as a teenager and how that child died. Spell-binding stuff, silkily evoked.

Then came a crisp statement issued to the programme by the religious order involved. Or perhaps that should be the religious order NOT involved.

Because the statement said their records didn’t include Kathy O’Beirne.

Ever. In any Magdalen laundry. At any time. Next up was The Brother. According to The Brother, the whole thing was fiction and the father portrayed in the book as vile was anything but. Kathy O’Beirne protested that she hadn’t been told The Brother would be on the programme.

Lesson #1: Spiders don’t usually warn flies that they may not have the best of intentions toward them. Spiders are spiders.

Then along came another spider and sat down beside her. Several, in fact.

Including a neighbour who averred that she knew things about Kathy O’Beirne she was not going to tell on radio, which a) begged the question why she’d spidered in at all and b) irritated listeners and the main spider in equal measure.

Lesson #2: Ireland may be growing apace, but it still holds interlocking Maeve Brennan neighbourhoods filled with people who knew you before you became famous and are more than willing to use that knowledge to poke a hole in you.

Kathy O’Beirne did not go unsupported, however. A man named Michael Sheridan pitched up to buttress her case and was about as useful as a torpedo. Sheridan ghost-wrote the book. Asked to account for the discrepancies between what he’d written and the memories of the majority of witnesses, he stoutly stated that in any family, siblings have different memories. Indubitably. But THIS different? Joe “Spider” Duffy kept it simple. The web he wound around Sheridan was all about truth. How could the book be true? Easy-peasy, according to the ghost-writer. The people had voted with their feet. They had bought the book in their hundreds of thousands. Therefore it had to be true.

Lesson #3: The size of the gullible audience has damn all to do with the truth of what they buy.

Lesson #3 is not confined to Ireland. Three and a half million people, world-wide, have bought copies of an autobiography called A Million Little Pieces, enthusiastically critiqued on publication as “unflinchingly honest” in its account of a drink-and-drugs addict named James Frey who, driving while high as a kite, hit a police car, resisted arrest and was imprisoned for violent disorder. It has now emerged that all he got was one ticket for driving under the influence and another for driving without a licence. Unflinchingly DIShonest would have been a better description.

Frey’s case and that of Kathy O’Beirne have interesting points in common.

The Brother, on radio last week, kept asking why the ghost-writer or the publisher had never talked to any of her eight siblings to fact-check the volume before selling it. The publisher has since claimed to have done “everything we could to investigate the claims”. Like what, specifically? In contrast, Nan Talese, the eminent American publisher who brought out Frey’s book (now dubbed A Million Little Lies) says that when presented with such a memoir, she asks herself searching questions like, “Does it strike me as valid? Does it strike me as authentic?” The Frey fiasco may make her approach a tad more rigorous.

Lesson #4: Vivid remembered details do not constitute truth. They may constitute excellent fiction, or inspired borrowings, but truth is what verifiably happened.

The curious fact emerging from each of these cases is that failure makes a writer more credible than success. If someone presented a book to either Talese or the people who brought out Kathy’s Story which documented a triumphantly-successful life that nobody else had noticed, it would give rise to fact-checking. But accounts of unmanaged personal misery somehow earn the storytellers a free pass.

Someone who is prepared to reveal grotty, gruesome or shameful aspects of themselves is assumed to be especially honest.

Lesson #5: There’s gold in them thar ills: let us never underestimate the incentive of millionaire status when examining why a writer might reveal themselves to have been less than admirable in their past. Plus, there’s the backdoor of “redemption”. Oprah Winfrey, who later described herself and millions of readers as “duped” and “betrayed” by James Frey, first fell for the book because it was about a man redeeming himself from the nasty wart he was as a young man. The charm of the converted outlaw initially protected Frey from searching questions. A different factor came into play regarding Kathy O’Beirne.

When it comes to tales of abuse by religious orders in Ireland in living memory, claimed victimhood brings with it absolute immunity from interrogation, which is cast as further victimizing the victim.

Lesson #6: Claimed victimhood should not entitle the claimant to avoid civilly-asked questions, the answers to which would allow verification of their account.

Now, exactly why the ghost-writer offered himself up as a fly to Mr Duffy boggles the mind. His name isn’t even on the front of the book, because, he says, Kathy asked him to take it off the cover and he agreed. He could have taken his money and run. Instead, he went on the airwaves, got cocooned in a sticky web and in his efforts to get out of it, mated the rhetorical question with the smear: why, he wanted to know, had Kathy O’Beirne’s family waited all this time to raise questions about the book? Several answers popped into the listeners’ minds. Maybe the family members were busy. Maybe they hoped the book would sink like a stone. Maybe they thought attacking it would do their damaged sister more damage. Maybe — just maybe — they thought attacking it would make THEM look bad. But in fact, according to The Brother, the family DIDN’T wait until now to raise questions. They raised questions right from the start, and were ignored.

Lesson #7: Owning the truth (and the research/documentation to prove it) tends to diminish the need to smear people who question it.

The RTÉ programme didn’t quite say it, but the message was inescapable: if you want a good cry, fiction may be a safer investment than non-fiction.