Gabriel García Márquez on the Difference Between Novels and Journalism … Quote of the Day #15

Gabriel García Márquez on truth in fiction and nonfiction …

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work.”

García Márquez ‘s answer to, “Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?” Peter H. Stone asked the question in an interview with the Nobel laureate that appears Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Sixth Series (Viking, 1984). Edited by George Plimpton. Introduction by Frank Kermode.

Comment by Janice Harayda:

This is one of the most perceptive comments I have read on the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. How many times have you read a newspaper article that had a small — even trivial — error that fatally undermined a good story? And how many times have you read a novel with a detail so wonderful that you forgave any defects in the book?

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Joan Ryan’s Exposé of Abuses in Gymnastics and Figure Skating

Aiming for the Olympics in a glamour sport can mean living with eating disorders, crippling injuries, and tyrannical coaches

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters: Revised Edition. By Joan Ryan. Warner, 243 pp., varied prices.

By Janice Harayda

You think the steroids scandals in baseball are bad? Try reading this chilling exposé of the exploitation of America’s best young gymnasts and figure skaters, which grew out of an award-winning series that Joan Ryan wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. Some of the abuses described in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes are worse than any in baseball because they affect athletes who are much younger and more vulnerable.

Many people have written about the dangers of Olympic-level gymnastics and figure skating, such as the high risk of eating disorders. But Little Girls in Pretty Boxes unique for its powerful documentation of the abuses, typically through heartbreaking stories of well-known athletes and the physical and emotional damage they suffered at the hands of parents, coaches, and federations that ignored the obvious dangers in their sports. Ryan spoke with former stars like skater Elaine Zayak and the Bela Karolyi–coached gymnast Kristie Phillips about the lasting pain of their exploitation in their peak competitive years. She also interviewed the mother of Julissa Gomez, who died after breaking her neck on a practice vault at a meet in Tokyo.

First published a decade ago as a book for adults, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes has become a modern sports classic. It has also found a strong following among adolescent girls. It’s heartening to know that if adults don’t recognize all the dangers in glamour sports, this book may help young athletes spot them on their own.

Best line: “In staving off puberty to maintain the ‘ideal’ body shape, girls risk their health in ways their male counterparts never do. They starve themselves, for one, often in response to their coaches belittling insults about their bodies. Starving the body shuts down the menstrual cycle – the starving body knows it cannot support a fetus — and thus blocks the onset of puberty. It’s a dangerous strategy to save a career [in gymnastics or figure skating]. If a girl isn’t menstruating, she isn’t producing estrogen. Without estrogen, her bones weaken. She risks stunting her growth. She risks premature osteoporosis. She risks fractures in all bones, including her vertebrae, and she risks curvature of the spine. In several studies over the last decade, young female athletes who didn’t menstruate were found to have the bone densities of postmenopausal women in their 50s, 60 and 70s.”

Worst line: This book appeared in a revised second edition in 2000, so the text doesn’t reflect rules changes that have occurred since then.

Recommended … to parents and coaches of young gymnasts, figure skaters, dancers, cheerleaders and others involved in sports that favor the young, thin, and pretty. Little Girls in Pretty Boxes may also appeal to many teenage girls and adults who like books such as Alex Kuczynski’s recent Beauty Junkies. It is easily one of the best books — maybe the best — on women’s sports of the past ten years.

Published: 1996 (first edition), 2000 (revised second edition).

Furthermore: This book was made into a 1997 movie. If the direct link at the end of this line doesn’t work, search for Little Girls in Pretty Boxes at  www.imdb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119551/

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Alex Kuczynski Lowers the Boom on the Cosmetic Surgery Boom

A beauty of a book about the dangers of trying to correct nature’s mistakes

Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery. By Alex Kuczynski. Doubleday, 290 pp., $24.95.

A radio station in Detroit had a contest called “New Year, New Rear” that gave the winner $15,000 worth of liposuction. A film executive’s wife in Bel Air had her genitals surgically altered through labiaplasty. An Irish woman died in Manhattan after a face-lift by doctor who sought publicity by giving interviews to Elle and Cosmopolitan.

How did we get to a point that all of this seems almost normal? What are the social, emotional, and medical costs of the cosmetic surgery boom? Alex Kuczynski gives fearless and persuasive answers in Beauty Junkies, a skillful blend of reporting, social commentary, and advice to people who are thinking of going under the knife.

You can argue with Kuczynski’s thesis that “looks are the new feminism, an activism of aesthetics.” You can argue with some of her conclusions, which reflect life in New York and Los Angeles better than in the Heartland (though the coasts are bellwethers for the rest of the country). And you can argue with advice such as: “Distrust doctors who are too tan.” If you’re having surgery, wouldn’t you prefer a rested doctor to one with a hospital pallor induced partly by too little sleep?

But Beauty Junkies is so well-written and –researched that it may stand for years as the definite book of reporting on its subject. Nearly every page has an “Oh, my God” moment. A study found that “overweight job applicants are judged more harshly than ex-felons or applicants with a history of mental illness”? Oh, my God. An urgent care center in Malibu gives Botox shots because wrinkles are now considered an “emergency”? Oh, my God. Kuczynski’s upper lip swelled up to “the size of a large yam” after a Restylane shot and took five days to return to normal? Oh, my God.

A Styles section columnist for the New York Times, Kuczynski shows a particularly admirable willingness to expose the conflicts of interest that abound in the portrayal of cosmetic surgery in “women’s magazines, men’s health magazines, and some city magazines,” the first line of information for many Americans about new procedures. The unpleasant truths include that writers and editors often get free surgery in exchange for writing “something wonderful about it.” One physician who has appeared in these magazines is “one of the most-sued doctors in the country, with a jaw-dropping record of 33 settled malpractice suits since 1995.”

The Devil Wears Prada startled many people with its fictionalized portrayal of all the editorial freeloading at women’s magazines, the fashion-and-beauty industry equivalent of a permanent Iran-Contra affair with regular arms-for-hostage negotiations. Beauty Junkies is much scarcier, because it’s true.

Best line: “In a city like New York, people like to talk about their addictive personalities, as if having an addictive personality were a mark of achievement.”

Worst line: “The New York Times does not allow reporters to receive anything from any news source for free – no free face-lifts, no free shoes, not even a bottle of champagne at Christmas that costs more than $25.” So the editors of The New York Times Book Review pay for the hundreds of books they get every week? Or at least reimburse publishers for any that cost more than $25?

Recommended if … you’ve ever looked in the mirror and wondered if there could be any harm in smoothing out a few of those crow’s feet with a little Botox.

Editor: Stacy Creamer

Published: October 2006 www.alexkuczynski.com

Posted by Janice Harayda
© 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

One-Minute Book Reviews is an independent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, book editor and critic for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. Please visit www.janiceharayda.com to learn more about her comic novels, The Accidental Bride (St. Martin’s, 1999) and Manhattan on the Rocks (Sourcebooks, 2004).

Igal Sarna’s Lost Israelis

A former tank commander explores the cost of exile with a style reminiscent of the early Joan Didion

The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle: Israeli Lives. By Igal Sarna. Translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman. Vintage, 210 pp., $13, paperback.

Igal Sarna is a literary journalist who has no precise counterpart in the United States, and not just because he served as a tank commander in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He writes about the hidden lives of ordinary Israelis with an insight and clarity that recalls both the high style of the early Joan Didion and the medical precision of Irwin Yalom, the author of a memorable book of psychiatric case histories called Love’s Executioner (Basic, 1989).

Each of the 14 essays in The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle profiles a person or group whose life has been cleft by tragedy — men and women uprooted by the Holocaust, beaten in Iraqi-ruled Kurdistan, and tortured in a Syrian prison. Sarna’s subjects came to Israel seeking new lives but were overmatched by war, loneliness, poverty or the harshness of the Negev Desert. Many committed suicide or became “shells of human beings,” casualties of social service agencies overwhelmed by the crush of refugees. The happiest is a 92-year-old Kurdish Jew who once used a hoe to kill a snake that had slithered into his home on a hill slope and still drinks tea flecked with the brown ants that infest his sugar supply. Sarna offers compassionate but unromanticized portraits of all of them and makes clear that their failings, if profound, were never theirs alone. The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle shows a side of modern Israel that few others have described with such poignancy.

Recommended if … you miss the glory days of “the new journalism,” or want to understand the long-term effects on the human psyche of decades of crises in the Mideast.

Best lines: “Faulty immigrant reasoning, and a desire to save money, made them decide to live in Beersheeba’s huge neighborhood of ready-made caravan homes, one of dozens of such camps set up all over the country in the 1990s to the house hundreds of thousands of newcomers from Russia. But whoever begins their life in Israel in a place of that sort seals their fate. The desert is a hard place in and of itself, and needs a lot of greenery to soften it form human habitation. The caravan neighborhood, where each home has just over 200 feet of floor space, is a merciless patch of desolation. The homes are made of cheap, graceless material and stand on bare earth that sends up a cloud of dust with each footstep. Electrical wires strech overhead, thin bars separating human from sky.”

Worst line: None.

Caveat reader: This review doesn’t assess the accuracy of the translation by Haim Watzman.

Published: October 2002

Posted by Janice Harayda

(c) 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.