That James Frey lied in his book, A Million Little Pieces, is old news. People are tired of debating whether Oprah is the b**** we always knew she was, or a hero for admitting she was wrong in her initial defense of this guy. After all, admitting fault is something we rarely see these days, even if it did come in the form of a sanctimonious dressing down of that poor, cornered sap. I wonder if he thought Oprah invited him on her show for a second appearance to further defend him, and instead he found himself in the Court of Queen Oprah. I have to admit, part of me was secretly tickled pink to think this guy had to answer to the diva of all divas for his silly lies.
I didn't watch Oprah relieve herself on national tv, but I was watching Larry King when she called to defend Frey originally. Am I naive to believe it was spontaneous? Was I sucked in, imagining some screener pooping his pants, arms waving a frantic signal to a producer, mouthing, "It's HER!!!", while the reg'lar folks whose calls to the show were cued rotted in telephonic purgatory? Oprah waits in line for no one, and if you don't understand that, Bub, you aren't alive in America. And surely if the call was planned, she would have come off just a teensy bit more thoughtful as she pronounced Mr. Frey innocent on the grounds of adding value to the lives of readers in her book club. If I hear Oprah offer up "redemption" by way of her book selections one more time, I think I'm gonna hurl.
My daughter and I were discussing Frey's situation, and I was merciless regarding a writer's obligation to refrain from making things up when selling a work as nonfiction. We agreed, but Kara was generous in her evaluation of him as a human being (our little Court of Queens had now been called to order). We agreed that sometimes real life just isn't good enough, and we all have our means of making it better, or at least different; some go to obviously damaging lengths in their efforts to do so. Duh. She joked that Frey may have recovered from his need to enhance life chemically, but hadn't completely recovered from his need to make life more than it is, or was, that exaggerating the reality of his struggle in a sphere so public as a bestselling book was a sure sign that he still had some "work to do."
Don't we all have "work to do"? And yes, we should be generous to all of humankind, if for no other reason than we may, some day, find ourselves in the Court of Queens. Still, I'll be damned if I'll spend 5 minutes searching for truth in James Frey's work of nonfiction that's fiction. That's too "real life" for me.
1 comment:
The columnist's assessment of the alcoholic personality doesn't excuse that Frey and his publisher allowed the book to be marketed as a nonfiction account of his road to recovery. The recovery part is certainly subjective, but his story doesn't qualify as nonfiction, and I don't know about the publisher, but at least he knew it.
Of course we all interpret experience individually, but on Larry King Live Frey implied that he was justified taking liberties he knew were false in order to add interest to his story, as it is a "memoir." Bullshit.
If he had presented the work as fiction, I'd have no problem, but I think he and his publisher knew "reality reading", like "reality tv", is very profitable and someone jumped on the bandwagon without respect for the reader or the integrity of the genre.
Maybe your calling the book A Tiny Million Pieces is meant to lampoon Frey, and I missed your point. If so, excuse my going on about it :-)
Regardless, I'm sure James Frey, Oprah, or anyone for that matter, won't lose any sleep over my opinion on my one among a million little blogs. He didn't get away with it, so I guess I can relax :-)
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