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Thursday, January 19, 2006

A Million Little Feces

Posted by on January 19 at 10:53 AM

Originally, I was cavalier about the James Frey debacle. I’d read A Million Little Pieces, got a fair sense of its self-serving romanticizations upon contact, and initially dismissed the hubbub as naive mudslinging.

As the controversy spun out, I learned the specifics of Frey’s inventions, the nature of his amplifications, and, most creepily, the switcheroo in the book’s classification. (Originally shopped around as a novel, the book only sold after Frey re-labelled it a memoir.) The more I thought back on Frey’s book, the creepier it all got: At bottom, AMLP is a Tale of Redemption, but the stakes of any redemption are set by the depths from which the protagonist is redeemed, and by artifically lowering his depths—grossly overstating his criminal history, inventing rehab tortures out of whole cloth—Frey reveals himself to be a con artist.

The strongest argument I’ve read against Frey came in this past Sunday’s New York Times, where Liars’ Club author Mary Karr blasts Frey’s deeds on moral grounds before hitting her most persuasive angle, discounting Frey in the name of art:

At one point [during the writing of Liars Club], I wrote a goodbye scene to show how my hard-drinking, cowboy daddy had bailed out on me when I hit puberty. When I actually searched for the teenage reminiscences to prove this, the facts told a different story: my daddy had continued to pick me up on time and make me breakfast, to invite me on hunting and fishing trips. I was the one who said no. I left him for Mexico and California with a posse of drug dealers, and then for college. This was far sadder than the cartoonish self-portrait I’d started out with. If I’d hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I’d never had to overcome - a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties - I wouldn’t have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth.

The point: Truth is stranger—and slipperier—than fiction, and James Frey sucks for taking the easy, self-aggrandizing way out.


CommentsRSS icon

How brillantly stated.

James Frey is a punk. And I am still angry.

As an (unknown) author, I can understand the opportunity to get a leg up by smudging the facts, but c'mon this was ridiculous. And I have to say that it severly impacts all of the struggling authors out there who are trying to write and promote themselves honestly, esp. when lying can get you to the top of the heap.

Schmades, I'm glad you changed your mind.

Oprah, shame on you for being an party to this sham and backing him so that you don't lose face.

Wow. I had no idea Frey had originally shopped the book as a novel. That actually reinforces what has been my strongest feeling about this (and the JT Leroy thing): we as a culture are unwilling to embrace a story unless we can believe that it's "real," and the more horrific the better. We want pity porn, not good writing.

Lisa Ve makes a good point. When I first read about this story the first question in my mind was "Is it good writing?" Yes, I felt the implications of what he had done were horrible. On the one hand was the liar feeding readers a line of bull in order to sell books. On the other hand, you had readers who were willing (some wanting) to be fed that line. But was the line any good?

Well, I haven't read the whole thing, but the passages that I have read were horrid. Perhaps that made the story more believable to people. In the JT Leroy case, Susie Bright noted that she got copies of stories to proof read with the sort of childish errors one might expect of a person of his/her age and that helped convince her of the tale.

It didn't sell as a novel because it's bad writing. It did sell as a memoir, in part, because it's bad writing. What does that say about the book, the writer, or the people who read it?

Honestly, what Frey did is not much worse than what Dave Eggers did. His Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Fiction wasn't as autobiographical as he made it out to be. He rarely saw his brother Toph and his sister did most of the caretaking, but reading his debut book you'd swear he was a surrogate father.

But I never saw anyone here skewering Mr. Eggers.

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