Memory is a tricky thing. Truth is not. Ask Oprah. Ask Doubleday. Don't ask James "Faction" Frey. I've been having a hard time wrapping my brain around the concepts of "emotional truth," "truthiness," "altered details" and "faction," all terms (some concocted) spawned by the embarrassing publishing scandal involving the selection of truth slayer James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" for Oprah Winfrey's book club. How do you know when someone is about to tell you a lie? I often ask my students. First, they stall, either repeating the question or throwing a question back. Or, they resort to fibbing, which of course, is not really lying.
Author James Frey and publisher settle suit over lies in best- selling memoir It's pay back time for disgraced memoirist James Frey and his publisher, Random House Inc. Under a tentative legal settlement, readers who said they were defrauded by Frey's best seller, ''A Million Little Pieces,'' can claim refunds, an agreement called unprecedented and understandable by a leading publishing attorney.
Since Oprah Winfrey chose "A Million Little Pieces" for her book club in September, the book and its author have been catapulted to fame. Advertised as a memoir, "Pieces" tells the story of recovering alcoholic and crack addict James Frey, recounting his early 1990s stay in a Minnesota rehab center and the events that lead up to it. It's an in-your-face bit of nonfiction full of very coarse language and content, but that hasn't stopped it from being a runaway success. Since being published in 2003, it has sold more than 3.5 million copies, a large number of those thanks to Oprah's selection for her book club.
Author James Frey and publisher settle suit over lies in best- selling memoir It's pay back time for disgraced memoirist James Frey and his publisher, Random House Inc. Under a tentative legal settlement, readers who said they were defrauded by Frey's best seller, ''A Million Little Pieces,'' can claim refunds, an agreement called unprecedented and understandable by a leading publishing attorney.
Do you feel like a fool? Well, join the crowd. Writer James Frey has a lot of people feeling that way most notably (and vocally) Oprah Winfrey. "A Million Little Pieces," his memoir of addiction and recovery, has been dubbed "A Million Little Lies" by the Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site that found he had taken broad liberties with the truth.
MORE THAN A YEAR ago, Joe Biden, Les Gelb and others proposed a federal solution for Iraq. The basic argument was that Iraq is a ruptured society and there is no way to reconstitute it from the center. There is no social trust between Sunnis and Shiites, the federalists observed. There is a winner-take-all mentality, which is not conducive to compromise. There is no tradition of impartial rule or impersonal justice, making it hard to establish big national institutions that won't favor one tribe or sect.
It was the dead of winter in 2006, and James Frey was in a bad way. His best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," had recently come under fire in the national media for factual inaccuracies. He had just appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to defend his work, and Oprah, once a fervent Frey supporter, had torn the author into a billion little shreds.
The curious case of a soldier/ writer who penned dubious dispatches from Iraq about morally corrupt American soldiers continues apace. Following two weeks of investigation and fact checking, it appears that the writer in question has not been precisely honest.
It's possible that nonfiction, as a label for an entire literary genre, has outlived its usefulness. It seems more and more readers (and some critics) are on a passionate, hellbent pursuit of truth in their reading materials -hence the rise of the memoir over the tried- and-true novel on bestseller lists. And though memoirists and authors of other creative nonfiction have always taken liberties with character, time, and place - sometimes to protect the innocent, but just as often for dramatic purposes - in this era of reality television and instant gratification, the masses are no longer likely to accept "but it's art" as an excuse for what they define as lying. See, for instance, the unprecedented outcry after it was revealed that author James Frey had exaggerated and confabulated port...
The sign in the lobby of the Blender Theater in New York, where James Frey is opening his once-unthinkable book tour, reads "NO RE- ENTRY. All exits are final. For the author of "A Million Little Pieces," that's simply another story in need of a disclaimer.
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