James Frey’s editor said he didn’t know. James Frey’s literary agent said she didn’t know. James Frey’s publisher said she didn’t know. James Frey’s readers said, apparently, they didn’t care. Or didn’t care enough to stop buying his memoir-in-dispute, A Million Little Pieces, which held its place on the New York Times bestseller list during a several week-long literary storm that should have capsized the book. Oprah said she didn't care; then she changed her mind and said she did care. A lot.

Like Oprah, the New York Times appeared to care a little too much – front page stories, columns, op-eds, day after day – covering the unfolding story with that barely disguised glee the media save for reporting on the missteps and misdeeds of media other than themselves. National TV, national radio, websites, blogs and just about every newspaper in the country focused on exactly what James Frey pretended to have experienced for the sake of dramatic storytelling (three months in jail, root canals without anesthesia) versus what he actually did experience (three nights in jail, standard dental treatment).

Questions were asked: What percentage of A Million Little Pieces was imagined rather than lived? Is it acceptable to play fast and loose with facts if the underlying message, the core truth, is untarnished? Was Frey’s literary agent complicit in what everyone seemed to agree was a deception (including, on Oprah, Mr. Frey himself) because she submitted the manuscript first as fiction and then as nonfiction? And how could an old pro like publisher Nan Talese appear to care so little about the veracity of the work she published as nonfiction? And, while we’re at it, why didn’t Random House engage in even the most basic fact-checking on a book whose power derived from its factuality?
All good questions. But not the question that was stumping me as I followed this story. That question was: Why was everyone so surprised to learn that a memoir was more fable than fact?

I consider it self-evident that memoir is not nonfiction. How can it be? Memoirs are made of selective memory, the product of insight-after-the-fact, of impressions made long ago. They are the stories people tell about themselves, and, whether they know it or not, whether they mean to or not, they tell these stories how they wish the stories were, how they need them to be, how they choose to interpret and understand the events of their lives. Memoirs, especially “trauma memoirs” like Frey’s, are often undertaken as therapy. The author – frequently not a professional writer – has lived through something big and bad, how big and how bad being a matter of self-per (or de-)ception, of how much the memoirist cares to know or find out about him or herself, of how much the experience has been understood, of how much responsibility the memoirist takes for the life he or she has lived.

Memoirs are not about research, fieldwork and fact-finding, the methods nonfiction authors employ to gather the material they will write about. When Frank McCourt, to take one celebrated trauma memoirist, writes a detailed anecdote about bicycling through the streets of Limerick to deliver a telegram some sixty-plus years ago, he bases his narrative not on interviews with the people involved in the story, not on archival research, not on letters or diaries or photographs or any kind of document. He writes what he remembers. Or thinks he remembers. Or what could have happened that he doesn’t quite remember. Or what makes a good story.

Filling in the blanks of an experience – writing that your sister’s dress was red when, for the life of you, you can’t remember what color it was, or that the house was cold and damp on that long ago day when you don’t remember but you assume it must have been because the house was often cold and damp – is taking liberties where liberties should probably not be taken. But what James Frey did was different. James Frey fabricated entire experiences. He contrived events. He wrote, in detail, about things that never happened. He intentionally rewrote his personal history to appear tougher and badder than he was, more worthy of pity or respect or whatever emotion he needed to pull from readers to make himself whole again.

With Frey’s book, it’s an easy call. A Million Little Pieces is a fictionalized version of the author’s experiences, what is called a roman a clef – a novel. That the manuscript was rejected as a novel because the writing wasn’t good enough and the story arc was overly melodramatic says something about the quality readers will accept in what is labeled a memoir.

This year Frey was the poster child for fabrication . Ten years ago it was Lorenzo Carcaterra and his Sleepers: A True Story (not) about growing up in Hell’s Kitchen. In between, there was Jennifer Lauck’s Blackbird, a grim childhood memoir that her half-brother contended was half-truth, and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, the revolting and sordid details of which have recently come under question.

It’s wasted effort to rake these memoirists over the coals for the sins of prevarication, fabrication and exaggeration. Let’s just stipulate that memoir, by its very nature (highly subjective personal stories) and by its methods (remembering rather than researching) is not nonfiction. The goal of memoir is not to carefully and conscientiously piece together a factual tale but rather (as Oprah tried to argue and then backed away from) to explore an underlying truth.

If you want the freedom to change the details, to describe events that never happened, create characters who never lived, imagine and invent rather than research and uncover, you have made a choice. You have chosen fiction. If you want your work to have the drama of fiction but also the inherent power and authenticity of fact, then, regardless of the writerly techniques you use (the novelist’s sense of character development, use of dialog, etc.), you have to discover, respect and use the facts. I do not think writers have to sacrifice facts for good, powerful storytelling. I think the two are entirely compatible. This is what good literary nonfiction is. Memoir is not bad nonfiction, or faulty nonfiction. It is simply not nonfiction at all. Let’s call it what it is – an uneasy hybrid, “fict,” “faction,” make up a name -- and let it be.

LAUREN KESSLER is the editor of Etude and the director of the University of Oregon’s graduate program in literary nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times magazine, the Los Angeles Times magazine, salon.com and The Nation. She is the author of ten books.