Million Little Pieces May Rest on Lies

James Frey’s book Million Little Pieces outsold everybody but J K Rowling last year. Oprah Winfrey’s book club selected it in September as the group’s choice read. Now, there are allegations that much of the memoir was embellished to the point of being outright lies. How very appalling, a writer making stuff up.

Mr. Frey’s book deals with some very unpleasant personal details like drug abuse, drug recovery, and the general mayhem that chemically altered states of consciousness generate. “I was a bad guy,” he told Ms. Winfrey in one of those saccharine interviews that has made the Oprah brand so valuable and which makes her program unwatchable. “If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.”

But like so many white kids in Grosse Pointe who dress, talk and posture like the MTV hoods they see daily (who are almost as fabricated as the rich kids themselves), Mr. Frey was more vanilla that villain. The Smoking Gun website shows evidence that suggests his prison time for assaulting a cop, inciting a riot and possession of crack cocaine didn't actually happen. “The overall majority of contentions he makes in the book are not borne out by contemporaneous police records or by interviews we conducted with police and court officials in Ohio and Michigan,” according to William Bastone at The Smoking Gun.

Yesterday’s morning TV shows, which should have been focusing on the Iranians breaking the UN seals at their nuke factories and on the NSA crimes against the citizenry, were hip deep in bickering over what was what here. No one offered the point that it was a matter of supreme indifference whether Mr. Frey’s work was fact or fiction. Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, perhaps the first memoir ever written, most certainly contained distortions of the truth if not outright lies. Any autobiography is likely to be biased, and this is something the American people should know from birth.

This journal holds that truth is matters, but in this case, Mr. Frey just isn’t important enough for one to care whether he tells the truth in his book or not. No public policy is affected, no lives are endangered, and the only harm done appears to be to the dignity of those who cared whether it really happened. Most people’s lives aren’t interesting enough to make into a book, either non-fiction or fiction based on real events – “quiet lives of desperation.” Mr. Frey may have made things up, and that helped his book sell. If anyone feels cheated, perhaps he should unread the book.


© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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