The Trauma Olympics - Writerly Things with Brooke Warner
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The Trauma Olympics<br>Jason Arday, fact-checking and memoir, and why writers lie
Brooke Warner<br>Aug 16, 2026
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© Shutterstock<br>Back when I was fielding memoir submissions for Seal Press in the late 2000s, I developed a sixth sense. An internal lie detector, if you will. I’d get a book proposal that was so unbelievable that it was both cringey and funny. My colleagues and I would read parts of the most egregious proposals aloud at editorial meetings. Call it what you will, but it was a way to blow off steam.<br>People often say, If it’s too good to be true . . . But you rarely hear the opposite: If it’s too bad to be true . . . We certainly see both playing out when it comes to memoir.<br>I remember one proposal that actually made my heart catch in my chest, both because the story was so terrible and because I didn’t believe it. What the author had survived was too much. Too many traumas, too tightly packed together, too frantic in their delivery on the page, as if shouting at me to pay attention, to listen, to see her. I started calling proposals like these the Trauma Olympics, as in the author was wanting to win them. I warned writers I worked with against this kind of writing because it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Readers want real stories, but people’s shit detectors are strong—and how you unfold a trauma narrative, and the ensuant resilience part of the story, matters a great deal.<br>I’m just a single voice in this publishing sea, however, and writers often tell me that the worse and more godawful a person’s experience, the more likely it seems they are to get a book deal.<br>They aren’t wrong.<br>This is a delicate topic, especially because I’m entering it this week on the heels of Jason Arday’s death (apparently by suicide though that’s not been reported). Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, came out on Tuesday. He died on Friday.<br>There is much to unpack about what happened leading up to his death, from accusations of plagiarism in his PhD dissertation and subsequent publications, to a hysterical public pile-on, to his (reported by him which I could not verify) $1.4-million book advance, to the online excoriation that apparently led him to take his own life. (Arday is Black, and I’m intentionally not writing about the race dynamics at play in what happened to him, but they’re worth reading and knowing about.)<br>Yesterday in The Atlantic,* Tyler Austin Harper wrote:<br>The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.
Though this is the worst and most brutal outcome, Great and Unfortunate Things was already gaining traction to become the next big memoir scandal. Harper wrote that the Arday story was “ultimately a niche academic scandal,” which may have been true, but the memoir scandal was just breaking. Its publication turned out to be his Waterloo.
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On Fact-Checking and Memoir
Earlier this month, I spoke on background with Anna Silman, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal,* about Whitney Frick, who’s acquired and edited Belle Burden’s Strangers and Amy Griffin’s The Tell. Both authors have been accused of lying—Burden more for omission, and Griffin for stealing another woman’s story and publishing it as her own. The profile on Frick ran earlier this month, and my contribution is my assertion that there’s “pressure on memoirists to push the envelope and find ever-more-shocking traumas to mine.”<br>I’ve been working with memoirists for a long long time, and of course people have lived through shockingly terrible experiences. The trauma is real, and readers are moved by trauma narratives. I believe trauma narratives are helpful for both writers and readers. They support readers to feel less alone. They in fact save lives.<br>But, in rewarding authors time and again for pushing ever more deeply into trauma, the publishing industry has also created an incentive structure for writers to push that envelope. To the point of lying? Yes, I believe so.<br>When Silman interviewed me for the Whitney Frick story, she asked me if Frick had overlooked anything about The Tell, specifically. Should she have known something was amiss? Should she or the publisher have done more?<br>My answer was no. Griffin maintains her innocence, having filed a big ole SLAPP suit against the woman whose story she’s alleged to have stolen to prove it, but it’s hard to say what her editor or publisher should have or could have done differently. Griffin asserts this is her story. And unlike with Jason Arday, the facts...