I have no issue believing in her finding an agent and a publishing deal quickly (strong hook, great story — a publisher would have seen the obvious marketability, plus it could probably be acquired cheaply from a debut author, so worth a punt).
I do tend to think, though, that it was the hook that sold it, not the writing, and that her agent would have worked extensively with her on re-edits before sending it out (SW says in that ‘Corrnesy’ interview that it was sent out ‘a couple of months’ after her agent signed her, and I imagine that time would have been spent on rewrites.) Then when it was bought, her editor would have done detailed work on it with her again, possibly several rounds.
I don’t imagine that either would have encouraged her to go beyond the ‘usual’ artistic licence of memoir, eg to conflate scenes, recreate dialogue, add detail etc in order to create a book that has shape, drama, a story arc etc. (Part of the issue with the TSP scandal is that readers in general are unaware of how usual this is.)
I was thinking recently of the US writer Mary McCarthy’s 1957 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, a self-questioning early misery memoir (orphaned in the 1918 flu epidemic, brought up by abusive relatives), in which, in the preface, she says her book makes a claim to be ‘historical’ in that much of it can be checked, and that if there’s more fiction than she knows, she’d ‘like to be set right.’
At the same time, after each chapter, there’s a kind of examination of conscience where she says which bits are contested by family or ‘made up’.
But the statement that interested me in relation to TSP is when she said how much she’d learned when she didn’t change things to make the story more interesting or reshape it, that
If I’d hung onto my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I’d never had to overcome, a portrait of myself as a scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties, I wouldn’t have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth.
I think that’s quite astute on TSP. SW does rewrite a self-caused mess of embezzlement, cover-up, financial bad decisions etc to recast them both as ‘scrappy survivors of unearned cruelties’ rather than people who’d largely caused their own problems. And, arguably, rejigged the timeline /severity etc of Tim’s illness to bang home the ‘unearned cruelties’ angle.