A Million Little Feces
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.
How brillantly stated.
James Frey is a punk. And I am still angry.