James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces was the No. 1 best-selling non-fiction book of 2005, beating out The World Is Flat, Freakonomics, and The Daily Show. He received a boost when Oprah Winfrey, doyenne of daytime talk shows, had him on her show and recommended his book, saying it kept her awake two nights in a row. The book and the author were the center of controversy and ridicule recently, when the Smoking Gun website exposed the lies at the heart of the tale of a man gone bad, and then redeemed.

Larry King hosted James Frey on his show last night to justify/explain his book and it's placement as non-fiction.

The fact that Oprah Winfrey stood by the wily Milli Vanilli-shifty James Frey on Larry King Live cost her some credibility.

It is kind of hard to believe that Oprah was just sitting at home in her jammies, flipping channels and saw James on Larry King and decided to pick up the phone like the rest of us and give her royal statement.

I felt like throwing up either at her naiveté or at her obvious attempt at trying to cover up the fact that she had been duped.

The book, A Million Little Pieces, was sold as non-fiction, which would mean it was an autobiography, but later when James got burned by The Smoking Gun he called his book a "memoir."

I was under the impression that the word "memoir" was just another classy word for autobiography. Larry asked him the same thing, to which James replied that the interpretation depends upon "individual perception" and it was a story that spanned fifteen to twenty years of his life.

Here is the meaning of memoir, according to dictionary.com:

1. An account of the personal experiences of an author.
2. An autobiography. Often used in the plural.
3. A biography or biographical sketch.
4. A report, especially on a scientific or scholarly topic.
5. The report of the proceedings of a learned society.

Did James' perception of the word "memoir" mean a rough sketch of his life with some facts smudged by alcohol and drugs?

Does he really expect sympathy from us when he explained that he was merely being creative about his experiences? Or as he put it, "a cut on his cheek became a gash," should be seen in the same vein as a traffic violation of having a beer bottle jammed near the driving seat to being held in possession of drugs?

Diehard Oprah fans may stand by this shifty fellow but he is just another con artist who took the Diva and her brood on a spin.

And, like a boy who had done something naughty at school, he tagged his mother along to vouch for him.

The whole interview was a fiasco we could have done without. It was an attempt made by a con artist to clear his name and he dug his literary grave deeper.

Frey has betrayed our faith in autobiographies. Now when we venture into bookstores we would look at "memoirs" with suspicious eyes or think of them as "compressed memories" as put by Oprah, which are either exaggerated or a whole lot of bullshit.

Memo to Ms. Winfrey: Perhaps the saying, "Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me" should ring a bell.