What are your thoughts on James Frey?
 

I finally picked up A Million Little Pieces, and I'm hooked. The book is awesome. I'm on page 90-something now. What are your thoughts on the whole controversy? To those who missed it: AMLT is Frey's nonfiction memoir. Oprah picked him for her Book Club and he sold like 1.7 million copies, second only to Harry Potter. The Smoking Gun investigated and found out that Frey made himself out to be tougher than he really was, extended his jail sentences and made himself out to be responsible for the death of two women when he wasn't directly involved nor responsible for the deaths.

Should he shunned forever? Was what he did that bad? Are you telling me that memoirs that included events that happened half a century earlier have never been embellished, manipulated, or made up? I personally don't see the big deal. If anything all I think he should have done is add the following to the beginning of the book: Events may have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes. In one ear for the reader, out the other ear, Frey is covered.

Thoughts?

One of the great things about it being early 2007 and not early 2006 is that I don't have to think about James Frey at all.

And "second only to Harry Potter"? - Hardly.

But my feelings, in a nutshell - Frey did it to himself, and he deserved it. The 'elaborations' in AMLP are much more substantial (and systemic) than you summarize here. Yet he published the book as a memoir (ie, non-fiction) only AFTER failing to sell it as a novel. He then went on any hundred talk-shows, most notably Oprah, and vouched for its merits and its honesty. Even when the story started to unravel, he stuck by the invented elements...

The main problem was, the book is powerful, and it does endear Frey to the reader. You really feel for him. To then find out that he had been playing the reader created a significant sense of betrayal.

Completely agree.

I wrote about this back when it happened... But briefly, he deliberately deceived both his publisher and his readers in order to sell books. (Note: This is after having tried and failed to sell the book as a novel.)

It's hardly a criminal offense, but it is certainly dishonest and disreputable.

I agree. I work at Barnes & Noble and one day I come into work and there's a giant stack of AMLP sitting on a shelf, I ask a co-worker why we have so many copies of it and he just points to the Oprah Book Club logo. I laughed because I read the book when it was first published in 2003 and loved it, but I was a little skeptical of the facts when I read it (I hate myself for saying that since i hate it when people say shit like that.) But I felt the same way about Running With Scissors and Sedaris' work, but it doesn't affect my love of their writing (Sedaris more so). I think Oprah gave it too much power. It would have been more effective to write the whole thing off, because I thought it was more funny than outrageous (the controversy, not the book). It's too bad an author with so much talent will have this hanging over his head.