THREE CUPS OF TEA by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
THREE CUPS OF DECEIT by Jon Krakauer
By now I presume that most of you have heard about the fervor surrounding Greg Mortenson and the possible fabrication of the majority of his book Three Cups of Tea. But if not, please allow me to explain.
Tea was first published in 2006, but became a bestseller only when it was released in paperback form a few years later. Since then, Mortenson’s own charitable organization (called the Central Asia Institute) has received millions of dollars from donors across the globe. In Tea, Mortenson’s friend and travel partner Relin narrates their journey through Afghanistan and Pakistan and Mortenson’s trials and tribulations to erect schools for ailing children.
After a skeptical New York Times article was written on the matter and Krakauer published the aptly titled Three Cups of Deceit earlier this year, that’s exactly what people began calling Mortenson’s story. Mortenson was accused, among many other things, of taking funds for personal use from CAI, building schools that were never properly employed or were built in locations that are impossible to access and fabricating dozens of meetings and interactions, including a viewing of Mother Theresa’s body post-mortem that apparently occurred three years after her actual death.
Having had the dubious honor of reading both, I was at first confused as to why Mortenson couldn’t simply write his own account of the prior events. This was, of course, before I got to page two and realized that the third-person voice was a necessary tactic in staving off the insane amounts of idolization of Mortenson. I would recommend this book to the same type of person who leaves a movie like The Last Song and feels perfectly sated.
Despite what is being called into question, certainly Mortenson will have built more schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan than either you or I will build in our lives, but the whole cacophony of discord has made me question the genre in its entirety. Between James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Margaret Seltzer’s Love and Consequences, when did the memoir jump the shark?
Today, if you aren’t some sort of mixture of punk, genius, billionaire, and/or Snooki, you aren’t worthy of a modicum of the public’s attention. Certainly The New York Times‘ Neil Genzlinger has a point when, in a particularly grumpy review of a collection of boring and self-aggrandizing memoirs, he rants, “Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an underprivileged child or been an underprivileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ‘60s, ‘70s, or ‘80s, not to mention the ‘50s, ‘40s or ‘30s. Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found religion. Held a job.”
But is there no happy medium to be found? Perhaps if the pressures to create such boundary-breaking non-fiction stories weren’t so high, none of these authors would have lied. Not everyone’s life can be the next HBO mini series; we need to step back and accept that we can be happy in a life that isn’t perfectly plotted with character arcs and nadir points. For those that do have that, please make your story heard. For those that don’t, there’s always fiction.
