Not Another Literary Scandal

Weekend Special | From the Forum
By Tramp Louie

Joshua Ferris won, and was then almost immediately stripped of, the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award after revelations that broke only minutes later that the novel was actually a memoir.

In Then We Came to the End, a critically acclaimed novel published last year, Ferris wrote about the eccentic and often paranoid life of designers and copywriters in a failing ad agency, brilliantly conveying the collective fear, pettiness, stupidity and yet also the compassion of office drones as anxiety rises to a fever pitch in the American dot-com workplace.

The problem is that all of it is true.

Joshua Ferris is not a pseudonym, but the real name of a real person, a former ad man, who actually grew up in Danville, Illinois, graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA, moved to Chicago, and worked for a Chicago ad agency facing layoffs at the end of the '90s Internet boom, none of which was acknowledged as factual in the text of the novel.

Little, Brown and Company, which published Then We Came to the End, is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Mr. Ferris's book tour, which was scheduled to end next month in Chicago, where he lives. "We felt deceived," a spokesman said, oddly echoing the sentiments of the characters in the book about a promised set of new office chairs.

In a sometimes contrite, often tearful telephone interview from his home on Monday, Mr. Ferris, 34, who is known as "Wheel" to his friends, admitted that the story he wrote in the book wasn't fiction, wasn't invented or imagined, wasn't at all fabricated, and wasn't even close to being exaggerated "one little teensy tiny bit," but was instead completely true. He confessed that all of the details in the book were actual, not merely based on himself and people he had worked with over the years.

"For whatever reason, I was really torn about calling it a memoir or a novel," Mr. Ferris said. "Maybe it was my ego getting the better of me ... I don't know. I just felt that I had the opportunity to do a good thing by giving voice to people nobody pays any attention to and there was no other way. I mean, who wants to read a slightly snarky real-life book about real-life people stuck in a real-life cube farm?"

Mr. Ferris' farce started unraveling last Thursday after he was profiled in the Business section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Mr. Ferris. Mr. Rothman saw the article and called Little, Brown and Company to tell editors that Mr. Ferris' story was fact, not fiction. "I used to work with that guy," Mr. Rothman said. "He was a real asshat. Always stealing credit for everything, always talking in the royal 'we,' saving everyone's emails, writing down every little thing we did or said at the proverbial water cooler, threatening to embarrass the shit out of us by writing a book some day in which we would all be desperate, gossipy, soulless white-collar wordsmiths if he didn't get his way. You know Tom Mota? The gonzo emailer, the guy who quotes Whitman and Emerson in the book? That's me. I'm the real Tom Mota!"

Then We Came to the End immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The Times, James Poniewozik praised it as "perceptive and darkly entertaining," but also noted that "70 pages into Joshua Ferris's first novel, set in a white-collar office, we meet Hank Neary, an advertising copywriter writing his first novel, set in a white-collar office."

The revelations of Mr. Ferris' mendacity comes on the very heels of the news last week that The Road, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of post-apocalyptic America written by Cormac McCarthy, was based on actual events.

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This item was first posted in The Readerville Forum by "Tramp Louie" on March 6, 2008. Minor changes have been made to it for publication in The Readerville Journal.