I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thinks Frey got away with not issuing a real apology. That man should run for office. He's exceptionally adept at avoiding responsibility and the truth.

Rosie O' Donnell's "bizarre, childlike" blog entry
appears to be an imitation of James Frey's writing style.

My wife is reading the book, and she says it's excellent. She knows a lot about the subject. When I sputtered "but he told lies", she just laughed at my naivete. "All biographies are full of lies".

I feel everyone has their own truth. If we take all creativity out of our life stories we are doomed. Bob R.

What crap: everyone has their own truth.

A lie is a lie. The excerpts from that book sound totally stupid and unreal. Vain exaggeration, bravado, macho boasting tall tales.

Like "The Boy Called It." Mom made him drink dishwashing liquid. Yeah, right.

Oprah is insane. Rich successful people can be idiots, too.

Don, I agree with you that Oprah received a lot of criticism for her original decision to back Frey. I don't think she changed her mind purely because of criticism she received. I believe she truly felt duped and embarrassed that her heartfelt feelings for those who have gone through a bad time allowed her to continue to back him. Big heart or not, I think Oprah realized if she didn't set the record straight, she would be an enabler.

Bob, being creative is one thing, being a liar is another. There's no room for lies in memoirs. If one wants to be creative, he should write fiction and sell it as such.

To Steven: "Like "The Boy Called It." Mom made him drink dishwashing liquid. Yeah, right." ...Why did you cite A Child Called It and question Dave Pelzer's honesty?

Pelzer also wrote The Lost Boy, A Man Called Dave, and Help Yourself. Both A Child Called It and Help Yourself were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Dave's incredible life story was not only featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show - Spirit Segment, but also The Montel Williams Show, Sally Jesse, Leeza Gibbons, and Barbara Walter's The View.

He also had documented proof from his teachers and police reports of what happened to him.

My hope is that Frey's chicanery doesn't lead to everyone believing that all memoirs are full of lies. That's just not true.

Fact, fiction or `other'
Doubleday's gobbledegook is part of the death of honesty by a million little cuts, writes Philip Marchand


Jan. 15, 2006. 01:00 AM
PHILIP MARCHAND


When I was researching my book Ghost Empire, following the footsteps of the 17th-century explorer La Salle across North America -- and let me assure the reader that, in this admirable combination of history and memoir, no characters were invented, no incidents fabricated, no conversations made up out of whole cloth -- I came across a historical figure of the period, a Franciscan missionary named Louis Hennepin.

Hennepin accompanied La Salle on some of his expeditions, and later wrote an account of his adventures that became a bestseller in France. But Hennepin, otherwise an upstanding character by all accounts, couldn't leave well enough alone. In a subsequent revised edition of the memoir, written after La Salle's death in 1687, he claimed it was he, not La Salle, who first followed the Mississippi River to its mouth.

It was a lie. And it ruined Hennepin's reputation. No historian can now mention poor Father Hennepin without a sigh over his terrible fib.

Keep Hennepin in mind as we discuss the subject of James Frey. Frey is a 35-year-old American writer whose memoir of drug and alcohol addiction, A Million Little Pieces, has been a bestseller and Oprah pick. It's a harrowing account of violence and outlawry, fuelled by the author's addiction to all sorts of mood-altering substances. It relates how he spent three months in jail after a row with police, and committed numerous other felonies under the influence.

Last week, an investigative website affiliated with Court TV, The Smoking Gun, announced the results of its six-week search into court and arrest records and interviews with police officers. It revealed that Frey spent a few hours in a holding tank, and that was it. He was "polite and cooperative" according to the officer who arrested him for driving under the influence.

Last Wednesday, he appeared on Larry King Live. Interviewed by King, Frey sighed over The Smoking Gun -- why would they do this to me? -- and defended his fabrications.

"A memoir literally means my story," he said. "A memoir is a subjective retelling of events." Besides, "the genre of memoir is one that's very new and the boundaries of it (have) not been established yet." His stretchers do not affect the "inner truth" of the book.

And he said The Smoking Gun had only been able to disprove "less than five per cent of the total book." You could trust him on the other 95 per cent.

Of course, as the example of Hennepin attests, the genre of memoir -- which literally means "memory," not "my story" -- is very old. Its boundaries are well established. It permits a certain exaggeration of facts. But readers who pick up a memoir still expect not to be lied to.

The new wrinkle in the case of memoirists caught in lies is the defence of "inner truth." This may date from the publication of Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood, a "non-fiction novel" that purported to combine the scrupulous accuracy of reporting with the "inner truth" traditionally offered by fiction. The problem with In Cold Blood, as it turned out, was that Capote had cheated on the accurate reporting -- he had fictionalized characters, flagrantly misquoted sources and got things wrong.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most notorious instance of misleading advertising in Canadian letters is the series of books Farley Mowat wrote on the far north -- Never Cry Wolf, People of the Deer and The Desperate People. They were all sold as non-fiction. But as John Goddard, now a Toronto Star reporter, revealed, Mowat had fictionalized a great deal of these books. He spent a fraction of the time he claimed to have spent in the Far North; he never saw a starving Inuit; he never set foot in an Inuit camp, and so on. When I asked Mowat about these accusations at the time, he gave a variation of the "inner truth" defence. Readers were never let in on the secret.

There's another problem with the inner truth defence, however, aside from the question of misleading advertisement. The distortions and lies in a memoir are very often not designed to reveal the truth, but to make the author look good. We don't know the reason Father Hennepin gave in to temptation, but it probably had to do with ego.

The same is true of Frey's distortions. He wanted to impress the reader with what a tough guy he was, what a real bad outlaw. I'll bet a year's salary that his account of having root-canal surgery without anesthetics, and nearly beating to death a priest who attempted to grope him, are pure fabrications concocted for the same reason -- to inform the reader that, while he might have been a drunk and a drug addict, he was no sissy.

Finally, memoirists will pass off fiction as fact because it pays. This was pre-eminently the case with the late Carlos Castaneda, whose tales of an Indian sorcerer fascinated a generation of hippies. His books would never have been bestsellers if they had been honestly marketed as fiction.

Frey himself initially offered his manuscript to his publishers as fiction. More astute minds prevailed. "I can see a possible scenario where Frey wrote a less than satisfying novel and he told his editor that the story was based on his life but he wrote it as a novel because he was afraid of libel," Toronto literary agent Linda McKnight says. In that case, an editor, sensing that a mediocre novel had a future as a real life story, might well suggest a change of genres.

"What I can't understand is the publisher's gobbledegook about a memoir as simply personal recollection," McKnight says. "There is a difference between spending a month in jail and spending overnight in a holding tank. If people can't see the difference between these two incidents, there's no hope for humanity."

Fact, fiction or `other'
Doubleday's gobbledegook is part of the death of honesty by a million little cuts, writes Philip Marchand


PHILIP MARCHAND


When I was researching my book Ghost Empire, following the footsteps of the 17th-century explorer La Salle across North America -- and let me assure the reader that, in this admirable combination of history and memoir, no characters were invented, no incidents fabricated, no conversations made up out of whole cloth -- I came across a historical figure of the period, a Franciscan missionary named Louis Hennepin.

Hennepin accompanied La Salle on some of his expeditions, and later wrote an account of his adventures that became a bestseller in France. But Hennepin, otherwise an upstanding character by all accounts, couldn't leave well enough alone. In a subsequent revised edition of the memoir, written after La Salle's death in 1687, he claimed it was he, not La Salle, who first followed the Mississippi River to its mouth.

It was a lie. And it ruined Hennepin's reputation. No historian can now mention poor Father Hennepin without a sigh over his terrible fib.

Keep Hennepin in mind as we discuss the subject of James Frey. Frey is a 35-year-old American writer whose memoir of drug and alcohol addiction, A Million Little Pieces, has been a bestseller and Oprah pick. It's a harrowing account of violence and outlawry, fuelled by the author's addiction to all sorts of mood-altering substances. It relates how he spent three months in jail after a row with police, and committed numerous other felonies under the influence.

Last week, an investigative website affiliated with Court TV, The Smoking Gun, announced the results of its six-week search into court and arrest records and interviews with police officers. It revealed that Frey spent a few hours in a holding tank, and that was it. He was "polite and cooperative" according to the officer who arrested him for driving under the influence.

Last Wednesday, he appeared on Larry King Live. Interviewed by King, Frey sighed over The Smoking Gun -- why would they do this to me? -- and defended his fabrications.

"A memoir literally means my story," he said. "A memoir is a subjective retelling of events." Besides, "the genre of memoir is one that's very new and the boundaries of it (have) not been established yet." His stretchers do not affect the "inner truth" of the book.

And he said The Smoking Gun had only been able to disprove "less than five per cent of the total book." You could trust him on the other 95 per cent.

Of course, as the example of Hennepin attests, the genre of memoir -- which literally means "memory," not "my story" -- is very old. Its boundaries are well established. It permits a certain exaggeration of facts. But readers who pick up a memoir still expect not to be lied to.

The new wrinkle in the case of memoirists caught in lies is the defence of "inner truth." This may date from the publication of Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood, a "non-fiction novel" that purported to combine the scrupulous accuracy of reporting with the "inner truth" traditionally offered by fiction. The problem with In Cold Blood, as it turned out, was that Capote had cheated on the accurate reporting -- he had fictionalized characters, flagrantly misquoted sources and got things wrong.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most notorious instance of misleading advertising in Canadian letters is the series of books Farley Mowat wrote on the far north -- Never Cry Wolf, People of the Deer and The Desperate People. They were all sold as non-fiction. But as John Goddard, now a Toronto Star reporter, revealed, Mowat had fictionalized a great deal of these books. He spent a fraction of the time he claimed to have spent in the Far North; he never saw a starving Inuit; he never set foot in an Inuit camp, and so on. When I asked Mowat about these accusations at the time, he gave a variation of the "inner truth" defence. Readers were never let in on the secret.

There's another problem with the inner truth defence, however, aside from the question of misleading advertisement. The distortions and lies in a memoir are very often not designed to reveal the truth, but to make the author look good. We don't know the reason Father Hennepin gave in to temptation, but it probably had to do with ego.

The same is true of Frey's distortions. He wanted to impress the reader with what a tough guy he was, what a real bad outlaw. I'll bet a year's salary that his account of having root-canal surgery without anesthetics, and nearly beating to death a priest who attempted to grope him, are pure fabrications concocted for the same reason -- to inform the reader that, while he might have been a drunk and a drug addict, he was no sissy.

Finally, memoirists will pass off fiction as fact because it pays. This was pre-eminently the case with the late Carlos Castaneda, whose tales of an Indian sorcerer fascinated a generation of hippies. His books would never have been bestsellers if they had been honestly marketed as fiction.

Frey himself initially offered his manuscript to his publishers as fiction. More astute minds prevailed. "I can see a possible scenario where Frey wrote a less than satisfying novel and he told his editor that the story was based on his life but he wrote it as a novel because he was afraid of libel," Toronto literary agent Linda McKnight says. In that case, an editor, sensing that a mediocre novel had a future as a real life story, might well suggest a change of genres.

"What I can't understand is the publisher's gobbledegook about a memoir as simply personal recollection," McKnight says. "There is a difference between spending a month in jail and spending overnight in a holding tank. If people can't see the difference between these two incidents, there's no hope for humanity."

Thanks for the interesting articles, Phillip (although why post twice?).

Kelly, it looks like Rosie's blog is that way, except all her blog posts are like that. it starts to get really creepy.

Bliffle, um, way to argue your point...? She's right, of course, but only to a point. While I don't think Frey went as far over the edge as some people do, I think he definitely went farther than most memoirists know to do. However, he also could have defended himself better instead of just cowering on Oprah's couch.

Bob, I agree, but again, writers can't take "being creative" too far, or what's the point of calling it a memoir? People take philosophies like that way too far. Everything in moderation (including moderation).

Joanne, I agree with you about Oprah. I think it was both the criticism and her own realizations.

I've chosen this article as an Ed Pick for the week!

Thanks, Joanie! That's very kind of you. I appreciate it.