How many of Frey’s Million Little Pieces need to be true?
Posted on Sunday, January 22, 2006
Watching the literary furor over James Frey’s recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces last week, I was reminded of an old joke. An honest country man was serving as a witness in court. He is asked, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth ?” The man sits a minute before looking at the judge and saying, “Well, tell me then, man, which one do you want ?” Publishers, writers and readers are doing some fresh thinking on how much truth should be expected from a memoir since the investigators at The Smoking Gun dug up extensive discrepancies between what Frey wrote in A Million Little Pieces and what others remember, and, more damaging, what court records show.
The brouhaha also reminded me of the first real story I had published, a personal account of my experiences playing pickup basketball. The first question the editor from the Chicago Reader asked me, as we began to work on the story, was “Is this true ?” It was, but I stammered around and couldn’t figure out what to say. Somehow, all of a sudden, like the man on trial, I wasn’t sure what I was being asked or what the answer was. Was my story the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth ?
Personal essays and memoirs generally aren’t. Events are taken out of context, they are manipulated, and, like a piece of clay, the more the memoirist works with the material, the more removed from the original it becomes.
My story was experiential, laden with a heavy dose of voice, written to entertain and maybe sometimes move the reader. It wasn’t journalism.
Several years later, when I was writing a memoir that grew from that early story, the questions of truth became more difficult. All those episodes were taken out of context and strung together with something pretty close to a plot. Has there ever been a readable memoir that didn’t alter time, exaggerate, change the sequence of events or omit information that might be included if the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth were being told ?
So what has Frey done that’s so different from other memoirists ? Well, he’s wildly successful, for one thing. Being on Oprah and selling more than 3. 5 million copies is surely wilder than the wildest dreams Frey could have been having when he was writing a book that was possibly a novel and possibly a memoir (he originally tried to sell the book as fiction ), when he was just trying to tell a good story. What would it hurt ? Anyway, who would know if he said he was in jail for three months instead of three hours or if he exaggerated his involvement in a deadly accident ?
These two fabrications are the most talked about, but the very long and detailed story on The Smoking Gun Web site, thes mokinggun. com, portrays inconsistency after inconsistency that adds up to a pretty convincing description of how Frey cultivated his bad-boy image to such an extent that his book begins to look more like scam than literary license.
Frey appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live on Jan. 11 to respond to the accusations. He said, over and over, that the part of the book that’s being criticized is such a minute portion that it falls within a sort of margin of error that can be accepted in a memoir.
And if you’ve read A Million Little Pieces, then you know what Frey says is, in a way, true. The book is most certainly about addiction and recovery, not jail time or an accident. These disputed issues are not central to the overall book, which is precisely what makes you wonder why he lied about it. Why didn’t he just leave that stuff out ? An addict trying to recover can be an addict trying to recover without having a criminal record or a tragic past, so why didn’t Frey just write about being an addict trying to recover ?
Revilers say Frey lied because the lower he made his pre-sober self look, the greater the story of redemption would be and the more likely he would be to get his book published and sell millions of copies and live out his wildest dreams.
Frey himself isn’t saying exactly why he lied about the jail time or the accident, but here’s what he did tell King : He was writing about events that happened 15-20 years earlier. He was under the influence of drugs and alcohol when many of the events happened. And for that matter, a memoir is one individual’s perceptions of what happened, and the essential truth of his book remains.
Frey said he had always acknowledged that he changed “names and identifying characteristics,” as if that had anything to do with what he’s being criticized for. He also got a little slippery when he mentioned his cut cheek so frequently described in A Million Little Pieces. Frey says that, in reality, it was the area between his lower lip and his chin that was cut, but it was more efficient to say “cheek” over and over than “the area between my lower lip and chin.” OK, OK, OK. Most readers no doubt understand some of these conceits of the memoir. The writer may fudge a little if he has a good reason for it.
But none of these possibly good reasons addresses why Frey exaggerated his criminal record and all the other issues raised by The Smoking Gun. It seems quite doubtful that he was so out of his head during the time of the events that he confused three months in jail with three hours. Or that he forgot or perceived three hours as three months, or that he was protecting someone, or even that he did it to increase readability.
Back in 2003, when the book was published, some critics seemed to sniff something amiss with Frey’s bad-boy persona. The words “posturing” and / or “poseur” were used by the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Orlando Sentinel and Salon. com, while at the same time many other critics lauded the book’s “brutal honesty.” Frey set himself up for a long fall when he wrote again and again in A Million Little Pieces, “The truth is all that matters.” Readers were invited to believe that Frey would tell it like it is, and so maybe it’s just a little too delicious when we find out this self-proclaimed warrior against BS doesn’t limit himself to the facts.
On one level, Frey’s primary defense — that the fabricated areas are trivial — is right. A Million Little Pieces is about the experience of being addicted to drugs and alcohol and trying to recover ; it’s about Frey’s mental and physical and emotional experience, and that is, truly, the essence of the book.
But, if we understand and accept all the reasons for and conditions under which a memoirist might omit, embellish or just plain lie, maybe at a minimum we should be able to believe that he won’t play with the facts unless he nearly has to. And that’s what’s so off-putting about Frey’s situation : It seems he didn’t lie to tell his story. He lied to sell his story.
There are some books that are worth reading only because they’re true. Frey’s was not chosen by Oprah because Frey is the new William Faulkner but because Frey had an uplifting story to tell. That is why readers feel duped.
A note to the reader or disclaimer might have avoided or at least mitigated the scandal. Memoirist Dave Eggers wrote to his readers, at the outset of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, “This is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes.” No doubt Frey and his publisher wish they’d done a better job spelling out the rules of engagement for A Million Little Pieces.
Wherever it is that memoir should rightly lie between fact and fiction, it would seem that Frey missed the mark. And because he did, writers and publishers will be thinking more seriously about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth for some time, despite the fact that Frey the phenomenon seems to be gaining momentum in the midst of ridicule, disappointment and controversy : A Million Little Pieces was the No. 1 seller on Amazon. com on the day of this writing. Melissa King, author of the memoir She’s Got Next, lives in Fayetteville
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