6:09 p.m. - 2006-01-30
I'll probably buy his next book, too.
The entire James Frey/Oprah debacle is getting a bit out of hand. Although I completely understand where Oprah is coming from (a first for me) because I actually read the book long before anyone had even heard of it.

My proof of that? The first-edition hardcover that I own... the one that has all of my notations in the margins, and my favorite passages marked. But that's beside the point because aren't all of us "literary types" hell-bent on proving that we discovered the good books long before Oprah got her monied hands on them? (Although, in my case, this is entirely true.)

And I loved that book. I loved it so much that I bought three more hardcovers to give out to friends. I bought it in paperback just to have a more portable copy to carry around with me.

I loved that book.

And while I'm mad a J. Frey for not even hinting that parts of the book were outright lies, I'm even more mad at everybody who is writing about the situation without ever having read the fucking book.

Yes. You all are worse than James Frey. At least I see where Frey is coming from--the exaggerations and lies do, in fact, make it a far better story. They grip you and yank you into the book because you honestly cannot believe that these things happened to another human being.

Which is why, if you haven't read the book, then you have no idea how important those, supposedly minor, lies were to the story.

Yes, if you haven't read the book, it might seem like no big deal that he exaggerated a three-day stint in jail into a three-month incarceration.

Because you've never read the book (or, giving the benefit of the doubt, you have read the book and know exactly what I'm talking about). It's not about the jail term--it's about what happened because of the jail term. It's about Lily supposedly hanging herself the day before he fucking gets out of prison because she can't wait another minute longer for him to be freed.

Which is why a smaill, seemingly innocuous lie like that actually has huge consequences in my mind as a reader. Because now I wonder if he really had a relationship with Lily at all. Oprah even brought that up to Frey--if he was lying about being in jail when she committed suicide (and that being the subsequent reason for her suicide), then why the hell did she commit suicide?

To which he had no real response other than to say that she didn't actually hang herself, she really slit her wrists.

Which is why I side with Oprah on this one. Yes, there is room for embellishment in memoirs, as Frey's editor/publisher (Nan Talese of Doubleday, which is a subsidiary of Random House) was quick to point out, a memoir is based upon the author's remembrance of his past. And those memories are definitely biased, they are definitely skewed in some way, and they are most likely exaggerated at times. Such auto-biographical exaggeration is almost expected in a memoir because the author is translating their life into something people will want to read.

But if you are out-right lying, then that is fiction. Frey knew that he didn't spend three months in jail--no one with any intelligence could confuse three days with three months--which is why yes, it is a big fucking deal that he lied.

The interesting thing, and I've only seen this tidbit in the newspapers and not other press, for some weird reason, is that Frey had actually written A Million Little Pieces as a novel and switched it to a memoir when nobody would buy the novel.

Which is why so much of it is based on lies. He had originally written it as a work of fiction, and then simply changed a few elements and shopped it as a memoir.

And there are so many lies in the damn thing. After the smoking-gun revelation, it seems like every other story manages to uncover a new set of lies. Even Oprah herself said that, after the original book club episode aired, her office received a call from a counselor at Hazelden (the rehab Frey attended) who insisted that the book was a load of crap, and that he was lying through his teeth. (That's a funny little pun about the lie he told about his teeth. The one where he didn't receive any sort of anesthesia during his double-root-canal because he was an in-patient at a drug rehab and they don't give novacaine and nitrous to addicts. Again, it seems small but, seriously, how could you conveniently forget about getting anesthesia during a double root canal?)

It's simply wrong. Frey had ample opportunity to admit to some wrongdoing--when he went on Oprah, and she praised his book and he was given a standing ovation by the audience full of devoted Oprah club readers, he could has brought up his "embellishments."

But he didn't. He passed the entire thing off as being true and that's why it was wrong. It's not, necessarily, wrong to write a memoir and consciously know that you exaggerated a few things for the sake of the story. But it is abhorrent to straight-out lie and act as if it's the truth.

Although I can't really get very mad at the guy because I did love the book. I still think he's a good writer, and I almost feel bad for him because he's going to have a hell of a time getting another book published.

And he's going through a lot of hellfire. Deserved hellfire, but he's still feeling the heat and that's what makes me so sad. The fact that he actually wrote such a wonderful book, and could have easily said that it was merely based upon his life, but chose to pass it off as truth in order to get more attention.

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