James Frey: Scapegoat of Truthiness

I haven't read A Million Little Pieces, but my girlfriend has read it and everyone knows this is basically the same thing. I can therefore assure you it is bad book. A cellophane-wrapped piece of mint candy that will freshen your breath and tell you in a predictable and simpleminded manner how to tough out rehab and thus be forgiven for all the nasty things you did when you were a drunken drug addict. So what. Some people are unredeemable. Most apologies are insincere. How do you explain that in twelve steps? If you want a more thorough analysis of the book, read Janet Maslin's review. I'm much more interested in the controversy than the book. The controversy is a hundred times more interesting than the book. Each day I am dumbfounded by the attention being given to this silly piece of mint candy literature, delighted at the foul taste left in the mouths of the American reading public by this breath freshener gone bad. Because now the American reader can no longer avoid the foul taste that has been there all along and must acknowledge the dubious motives and supreme artificialities fueling the current, plastic infatuation with memoir-ish writing and other various insipid chronicles of harrowing adventure and True Life heroism. Now that the American readers have begun to choke on one of these proven-effective bad-breath-eliminators, this 430-page box of Altoids ("curiously strong" at first, but after a while you get used to it) ... well, gee, it sure seems like someone should be held responsible. My feeling, though, is that this controversy doesn’t really have that much to do with James Frey or even his book because this is about Americans feeling betrayed and victimized within every level of their lives, by everyone they are supposed to trust. Our parents lie to us when we are little and our teachers lie to us at school. Once we are adults we find the institutions into which we have been taught to invest our faith are at root foul and devious. Our priests lie to us and our preachers lie to us. Our President lies to us. Even our nonfiction authors lie to us! The American story is filled with nothing but treachery and deceit. Mr. Frey’s story, then, which is about self-victimization and the possibility of transcending self-victimization, is actually a fairly appropriate forum in which to explore this collective anxiety. For who else can we blame for the rotten state of the economy, the terrible, endless wars we've started in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lack of equitable health care, the abundance of crooked politicians, the vast disparity of wealth and resources -- who else can we blame for this but ourselves?

Apparently we can blame James Frey.

This is sick. I am profoundly troubled that the only public person in this country with any conviction is apparently Oprah, as misplaced and shortsighted as her conviction is. At least she's standing up to someone, even if it's not the people with actual power. When will Americans wake up? What bizarre form of narcotic has lulled this country into such an unrelenting state of oblivion? Is this the work of television? Of pulp fiction? Should some of the blame be pinned on James Frey and the other writers of mint lozenge literature? The only thing that made James Frey's book interesting or in any way distinguishable from the next rehab memoir was the outrageous nature of its details. To find out that those details were exaggerated, then, that James Frey did not, in fact, experience extreme dental surgery, but instead intentionally distorted his memory in order to create a better story and sell more books -- this, of course, undermines the very foundation of that book. Some readers don't think so, but they are naïve. They are the most persistent of the many sleepwalkers among us. Look! Look at them stumbling all over Oprah's message board, standing by James Frey, mumbling in this or that way that the ends justify the means. Mr. Frey has also tried to defend himself, but I can't really blame him for that. Poor man isn't very clever, though, and when he appeared on Oprah to try and explain his confused distinction between the "essential truth" and the actual truth of his own life, he just sounded pathetic. The distinction he was attempting, of course, is a valid one -- though clearly he wasn't up for its challenge. For thousands of years humanity has been trying to determine the nature of truth, and Mr. Frey figured he could just blurt it out on a talk show? At least he got one thing right. His idea about having to create a character, a tough-guy protagonist that was really just a "coping mechanism" to avoid dealing with the cruel, overwhelming nature of his addiction -- this is really spot on. That's just the sort of thinking a real memoir writer does before he writes his book. Then, in his book, he deals with the consequences of that character and attempts to answer the difficult questions that that character implies. For instance: Between the spectacular, imagined identity and the messier, less heroic but factual identity, where does the real James Frey exist -- and what form of madness could have possibly caused such a schizophrenic invention in the first place? Where, after all, are the borders of sanity when beset by affliction? To what limits will the mind go to avoid self-destruction?

Now that sounds like an interesting book.


*The New York Times has given an unusual amount of coverage to this scandal. I have yet, however, to read anyone draw out the parallel between James Frey and the White House, so as I have suggested, and as I will now restate: I believe there is a deep psychological connection between the sense of betrayal caused by James Frey's book fabrications and the far more problematic, harder-to-express sense of betrayal regarding the fabrications of our political leaders.*

This is The Times' dramatic rendering of the televised Oprah v. Frey showdown.

This is an approach to the ethics of writing a memoir.

Here is the Times' official editorial stance.

Mr. Frey's book sales are dipping.

***Note: This piece by Michiko Kakutani, "Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways," touches on the parallel I've been trying to make here. It is a short but helpful glimpse at contemporary literature and "the truth."