Switching from memoir to novel

When L’Affaire Frey broke big, Martha Sherrill wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the whole business because it proved to hit uncomfortably close to home — but for the opposite reasons, as she tells the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“I originally sold the idea for ‘The Ruins of California’ as a memoir for a nice advance, and it was going to be about my California bachelor father and his incredible parade of girlfriends and what it was like to grow up in his unconventional world. After a year or so, I found I couldn’t write about it if I had to write the truth. It was going to hurt too many people!”

Luckily, the longtime journalist explored another approach, ensuring that her touching story of a quirky father-daughter bond would still see the light of day.

“Finally I decided that the only way to write it was to be free of the non-fiction rules of telling the truth …,” Sherrill sighed good-naturedly. “So I’m still paying back that advance, month by month!”

So by fashioning the book into a novel, she could meld fact and fiction together and not have to worry that Oprah would ever shame her on national television (or some lesser equivalent.)

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