James frey, 'A million Little Pieces' C/D?

In an October 26 show entitled "The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night," Winfrey hailed Frey's graphic and coarse book as "like nothing you've ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we'd come in the next morning saying, 'What page are you on?'" In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey's Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, "I'm crying 'cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much."

But a six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun reveals that there may be a lot less to love about Frey's runaway hit, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, has sat atop The New York Times nonfiction paperback best seller list for the past 15 weeks. Next to the latest Harry Potter title, Nielsen BookScan reported Friday, Frey's book sold more copies in the U.S. in 2005--1.77 million--than any other title, with the majority of that total coming after Winfrey's selection.

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."

In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls. "I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true."

it's weird, it seems like everybody i ran into was reading it at one point.

does anyone have any opinion about why he would capitalize "The Room" or "The Van" or whatever? i thought that seemed really amateur, and that if i were an editor i'd get rid of that.

i'm too lazy to google it, but aren't his parents (or at least his father) kind of well-known?

Nope, never heard of it or him. I'm usually reasonably up on whatever the popular books are just because I see them get checked out so often from the new books lobby here -- you should see the grief I get from people desperate to read the friggin' Da Vinci Code -- but this dude's new to me. As it is I think I'd rather reread Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight.

and i wonder if our cultures constant desire to reward transgressive, esp. rempetive/transgressive narratives makes a critical deconstruction on a popular level impossible...

and i wonder if freys refusal to play the usual games (he found himself. he searched his soul, alleuia) but get the rewards (OPRAH) was really really clever, a kind of postioning himself as an inside outsider (gawker also liked the book) decentralises/destabilised the life time movie of the week drugs are bad mmmkay story that people expect from him...

(ie leroys strangeness is that we on the radical left have played for decades that sexual orientation/gender are a matter more of aesthetic presentation/personae building then any kind of essentalism but we also get sad for people being mean to essentialised gay people, as a culture there is a mutal agreed upon polite tension that seems more and more untennable, leroy destabilises the narrative of the poor rentboy fag waif who pulled himself out by his talents, in a simmilar way as frey does)

(and yeah, they self aggrandise, and they are ego sluts, and all of that sort of thing, but i realyl do think that leroy and frey are interesting, messy, complicated writers, nto just persones, but writers, who do things with genre i thot was impossible...so i think rewarding them for that may not be a bad thing)

(and there are problems w. their writing, and queer folk/addicts who have been really seriously fucked over for their behaviour are most likely being exploited here, but anymore or less then oprahs/van sant's mawkish seeking of domestic melodrama?)

This somewhat begs the question.

one aggro asshole guarding turf from another

(maybe my workplace is blocking that site for naughty words/being russian)

This made me roll My Eyes every time it Came Up.

I am surprised he stopped short of doing Dickinsonian double dashes.

http://nealpollack.com/archives/2006/01/index.html

Since writing this, I realized that once Law & Order: Criminal Intent does the inevitable episode where Goren fakes out a puppy-murdering James Frey/JT Leroy composite, then the expose will be awesome once again.

I'm with the Milkmaid on that- going for a sort of Teutonic feel, maybe trying to cozy up to the magic-realist crowd that reads anything if it's in translation (which would also account for the poor writing, 'cause he could totally blame the non-existent translator for that)

1) there are like zillions of these recoculously precise descriptions of, say, what happens to be on frey's tray at lunch, item-by-item rundowns that suggest he's either rainman or a classically overembellishing liar

2) the spewing fluids etc. are straight out of evil dead 2--great fun but whole-cloth fancy, and soooo over the top that both its believability and impact go straight out the window. someone's excited idea of what a really bad rehab might be like. wait, maybe the wafer-thin mint bit from the meaning of life is a better comparison

1) there are like zillions of these recoculously precise descriptions of, say, what happens to be on frey's tray at lunch, item-by-item rundowns that suggest he's either rainman or a classically overembellishing liar

2) the spewing fluids etc. are straight out of evil dead 2--great fun but whole-cloth fancy, and soooo over the top that both its believability and impact go straight out the window. an excitable lad's idea of what a really bad rehab might be like. wait, maybe the wafer-thin mint bit from the meaning of life is a better comparison

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=peopleNews&storyID=2006-01-11T183418Z_01_EIC166779_RTRIDST_0_PEOPLE-ARTS-FREY-DC.XML

Random House IS NOT Offering Refunds!

"Contrary to erroneous published reports, Random House is not offering a special refund on A Million Little Pieces. It has long been standard Random House Inc procedure to direct consumers who want a refund on any of the tens of thousands of books we publish back to their retail place of purchase, unless they purchased the book directly from us in which case we refund it. Yesterday we had 15 calls to our customer service line specific to A Million Little Pieces and fewer than that today."

Hm. Blog-entry headline to the contrary, the paragraph in quotation marks (which is unattributed) seems to say that Random House IS offering refunds; the sole point of difference between this and the Reuters story is that refunds are not "special" but simply "standard Random House procedure."

Since writing this, I realized that once Law & Order: Criminal Intent does the inevitable episode where Goren fakes out a puppy-murdering James Frey/JT Leroy composite, then the expose will be awesome once again.

-- Michael Daddino (epicharmu...), January 10th, 2006.

hahaha OTM!

Sixteenth of all, WTF with Larry responding to Frey's calling out Jerzy Kosinski for fabrication of his memoirs by saying "yeah, and then he committed suicide!" ????!! and smirking???

He's no Janice Dickinson though.

Can Larry King smirk, though? Dude seems completely incapable of doing anything quite so emotionally hefty.

The other thing Frey repeated like a security blanket was "well, this is a memoir and memoirs are about the author's perspective and since I was drunk and drugged when this stuff went down I may have just distorted things without meaning to." Now, I've never been on a serious and sustained drugs and alcohol binge so I really honestly wouldn't know, but how the HELL do you hallucinate a mild DUI offense into nearly running over a cop, raising up holy hell, and all manner of felony charges? Especially when, in your sober life, you took steps to expunge court records pertaining to the case, which implies you have a pretty good idea as to what actually happened?

After publishing the book, a professor of Asian studies spent about a year ridiculing her, presenting evidence to the publishers that honor killings have never happened in Korea, and pointing out a lot of other cultural inconsistencies in her book.

Doubleday dropped her almost immediately and demanded their advance back. Her agent was aghast; publishers are supposed to stand behind their authors, yes? The memoir issue did come up then; these were her memories, they were difficult to prove conclusively; still, she didn't get half the chance Frey is getting. She didn't sell as many books though.

xposts

That's a style of narrative that has been around as long as literature itself and I find the naievete of some of the above objections quite incredible!

Fair enough if you don't like the content, but if you have a problem with the form then maybe you should stick to daytime tv. like oprah.

Thanks, GG Allin.

i.e., sure, near-totally fabricated memoir = fine thing with plenty of historical precedent, but being a big ol' poseur about what's got people thinking "what a dick this dude is." Postmodern? Sure whatever. Assholism? Absolutely.

cf Diderot, La religieuse

I don't care if it is a truthful rendering or not, my issue is more that the writing isn't so good.

postmodernity has been around for a very long time. as long as literature itself in fact, if you take postmodernity as a trope centring on the instability of the text and its predominance over the reductionist conception of authorship as proposed by Ned and Elmo.

Everyone's got an english lit degree here. It's hardly worth mentioning. Also, please excuse my English ignorance of UC Irvine.

Your general tone has been to ignore the conclusion Straight Up pointed out and that many of us were doubtless thinking about as well. Would you care to address that or does that do too much damage to your fragile psyche, which you will then publish as a memoir entitled Flamed to Death: My Saga, that Dave Eggers will then proclaim a masterwork?

n.b. Dave Eggers is shit.

sorry, yes, I forgot that postmodernism begins and ends in universities.

"Although it was often difficult, I think this kind of honesty is essential to any discussion of addiction -- essential to the people actually struggling with it, essential to their families and loved ones, essential to everyone in a culture that in many ways revolves around intoxications and addictions. Avoiding it, prettying it up, bragging about it, intellectualizing it, it's all bullsh*t pure and simple, and harmful, often fatal bullsh*t. My real hope is that my book, my often painful honesty, can cut through some of that and grab at least one person, and make them look at who they are and what they're doing, and change."

I never wanted to read Frey's book but I enjoy JT Lelroy's two novels despite the significant doubt I held that they were based on fact; I thought the writing was entertaining, the stories sad and funny.

Isn't Frey's prose very self-conciously stylized? If you decide to get involved in a work that is designed in such a way why should you really care about any of this? Fiction or non fiction, it's just words on a page.

Certainly the guy used publicity in a dishonest way but who the fuck cares about what people say on Oprah to sell books? People that need publicity like that to tell them what books to buy aren't genuinely looking to get involved in a work of literary art to begin with, it's just so middle class grandmothers can have a conversation topic.

Similar to how this successful guy's humiliating fall from an acclaimed position is a conversation topic us non-famous, non-successful types can take perverse pleasure in observing.

yer an idiot.

subtext: "Oprah's book club selections have no inherent literary value. _Anna Karenina_ and _100 Years of Solitude_ only exist to give middle class grandmothers a conversation topic."

I'm not an Oprah apologist, but use a finer brush, dude.

I don't. I didn't attend college at all. And I can still say that the bits of Frey I've read strike me as totally laughable kitsch.

xxpost
'the post-facto defenses of frey and leroy sound a little like the post-facto defenses of invading iraq '

The beginning Harold Pinter's nobel lecture answers this asinine point nicely (http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html)

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?'

That's what a million little pieces is - 'an exploration of reality through art'. It's neither justification nor recommendation for a set of 'real world' actions. The comment about Iraq is indicative of the misapplied moral code by which Frey's being dismissed upthread.

As for the comment that I should have to prove that I always read it as some kind of postmodern yarn - that's again a total misunderstanding of the point which is that it doesn't matter what (invariably differing) structural meanings different readers ascribe to it.

incidentally, what he's talking about not 'prettying up' here is addiction itself, rather than the specific facts of his personal addiction. I find the phrase 'my often painful honesty' slightly gauche but, again, the essential point is that it is needs to be read as a powerful story about addiction rather than a powerful story about james frey's addiction and I'd concur with Theodore's view that 'If you've ever gotten anything out of literature in your life then all of this should be a non-issue'.

(caveat: I'm really not that well read, I will accept being told I know nothing).

it's a livejournal that got published.

haha. what's this. bitter griping that his got published and yours and a thousand others didn't. the difference being, um, talent maybe?

...the essential point is that it is needs to be read as a powerful story about addiction rather than a powerful story about james frey's addiction and I'd concur with Theodore's view that 'If you've ever gotten anything out of literature in your life then all of this should be a non-issue'.

seriously ppl there's a place for that sort of self-fellating schtick, a very special place called "behind the record store counter"

incidentally, what he's talking about not 'prettying up' here is addiction itself, rather than the specific facts of his personal addiction.

But how does someone *brag about* "addiction itself" rather than "the specific facts of his personal addiction"?

Mr Straight
'anybody who feels even the slightest attraction toward present-day postmodernism's tired, self-inflated reading strategies should read bc's post about the Pinter address & then ask themselves "do I really think that utter joylessness is the way forward for critical theory?" DeMan or Derrida if alive would hock loogies into the fishlike open mouths of those who've missed the entire point of their critical exercise, which most assuredly wasn't to champion shitty books or "reclaim" dull-as-toast texts so as to appear current by talking about stuff that's in the news, only doing so with that special air of snootiness'

this means precisely nothing. a) De Man and Derrida would certainly have laughed very loudly at some cretin declaring that something so logocentric as 'the entire point of their critical exercise' existed. deconstructionism was intended as a critical approach, rather than a goal-orientated exercise. b) this thread has nothing to do with deconstructionism. the points I've been making have simply suggested that the conceptions of authorship and the text on this thread have been very narrow. c) there's nothing so joyless as seeing an illiterate fool attempting to be effusive: 'fishlike open mouths'? 'hock loogies'? You're embarassing yourself. At least try to address the point.

dude you don't know what you're talking about, go read the source texts a little more thoroughly and come back

and most especially leave "logocentric" back in 1993 where it belongs

And this is not an attempt at sussing out authorial intention?

What do you think the intentional fallacy IS? At least do thirty seconds' worth of googling before you get all huffy. Here ya go:

intentional fallacy is a term used by two important New Critics, Wimsatt and Beardsley, to describe what they considered the error of assuming a text means what its author intended it to mean.

Do you SEE???

To my mind the scandal is not that he embellished his memoirs but that he repeatedly misrepresented his book and himself in public to boost sales. It's a truth in advertising issue.

But I can't believe anybody thinks the book is worth defending on its literary merits. The writing is appallingly bad: grandiose and self-pitying at the same time, which is probably why celebrities love(d) it.

fwiw apologies on the intentional fallacy point. my misinterpretation.

other than that, i'd suggest it's not me that needs to go back and read the source texts, but fuck it, i'm outta here.

i'm sorry you didn't get published. but i hope your book is different, because i can't think of anything more tedious than a another book full of anecdotes about what some yutz did when he was fucked up on goofballs. it's like having to listen to some interminable recollection of someone's "crazy" dream.

"A Man walks out on stage and Everyone starts clapping. I recognize the Man as a famous Rock Star who was once a Patient here. He holds up his arms in triumph and he smiles and he bows and his black leather is shining and his long, greasy black hair is hanging and his patterned silk shirt is flowing …

He claims that at the height of his use he would do five thousand dollars of cocaine and heroin a day mixed with four to five fifths of booze a night and up to 40 pills of valium to sleep. He says this with complete sincerity and with the utmost seriousness.

Were I in my normal frame of mind, I would stand up, point my finger, scream Fraud, and chase this Chump Motherfucker down and give him a beating. Were I in my normal frame of mind, after I gave him his beating, I would make him come back here and apologize to everyone for wasting their precious time. After the apology, I would tell him that if I ever heard of him spewing his bullshit fantasies in Public again, I would cut off his precious hair, scar his precious lips, and take all of his goddamn gold records and shove them straight up his ass."

-James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

But that really gets at the heart of where this critical fallout against Frey is coming from. The only thing people genuinely have a problem with is the MARKETING of the novel. Claiming that he's done something unethical in his approach to writing the actual text are coming from a somewhat dishonest place.

Personally I don't care what happens to this guy, the "tough guy" persona he concocted and the immature dissing of other authors indiciate that he's brought the backlash on himself, and I still don't want to read his book.

What should be addressed is that maybe there's something inherently problematic about "confessional" art in general, and the free pass critics tend to give an artist who announces his gestures as personal and hence beyond criticism. Whereas when someone takes the post-modern approach of interrogating the very nature of truth in a text, they're met with the same stock dismissals, or worse, evasively snarky claims that post modernism is "out of fashion."

except for the money

haha. what's this. bitter griping that his got published and yours and a thousand others didn't. the difference being, um, talent maybe?

I can amuse myself for hours with just these two quotes

You probably think every *idiot* who's read The da Vinci Code never heard of Barthes. Puh-leez.

Secondly, don't use that "they wanna be cheated" line.

People have harped on that line of mine continually though. Nice work finding it upthread. You'll notice somebody else upthread peaked his head through the door called me an "idiot" before quickly skirting away down the hallway. It's elitism, you win and you're a good person for saying that's bad thing.

But my continually ignored overarching point has been that this guy marketed his book in a questionable way, but did nothing inherently wrong as an author but everyone has been pretending otherwise because they want their criticisms to carry more weight.

Without including a cheap shot at Oprah book buyers I'll say again, who cares about what someone says on a talk show to sell a book? Because that's all this is really about.

Um, no. There are at least 1,000,000 little reasons not to like the author or his book, which I have read. I have no idea what you mean by "wrong." (What would be inherently "wrong" as an author? I can't think of anything.) I think people are just saying he sucks, his book sucks too, and it's funny that the ONLY thing it maybe had going for it--it's hard-guy reality--turns out to not exist.

If authenticicity is your sole selling point, you'd really better be able to back it up. But "wrong"? I agree, nothing "wrong." Just annoying, obnoxious, pathetic, laughable, gross ...

he's getting shit for "embellishing" (though such whole-cloth fabrication really deserves a stronger word) his shitty memoir, whose only selling point is its authenticity--either as "hard guy clearing away all the bullshit" or "inspirational recovered addict." both themes or whatever utterly disintegrate in the face of him being what we call a big fat self-aggrandizing LIAR.

Not having read it I can still safely say the themes of the novel don't automatically disintigrate if the expereinces communicated as stylistically desgined words on a page don't align with what happened in Frey's actual life.

If people were inspired by his battle with addiction entirely through seeing him discuss it on talk shows or reading interviews with him, then yeah, the themes articulated their would disintegrate in said person's eyes.

There's a distinction between book object and publicity campaign that is very important to make.

no, I'm saying that the writing I've seen of it is so hilariously awful that immersion would only numb me to it, which isn't the same thing as "making it better" by any stretch of the imagination

xpost
Yeah I can certainly see that, thanks for clarifying.

"The truth is what matters. It is what I should be remembered by, if I am remembered at all. Remember the truth."

at the risk of sounding rude: no you can't. if you're really serious about this, i suggest you read the book and get a better handle on who and what you're defending. you might change your mind. for one thing, the notion that "based on a true story etc" was a latter-day selling point confined to a marketing campaign played out on talk shows is plain inaccurate. it's essential to very design of this particular "memoir" from page one.

put another way, as fiction it doesn't work. at all. which may have something to do with why no one would publish it as such. as nonfiction, it perhaps barely barely barely worked; now it doesn't work that way either.

regardless, everyone harps on the incident with the train crash, but as my capitalized "where's wallace"-style post up there is meant to indicate, the entire punch line to the book, i.e. the resolution of its love story, is that his illicit rehab love-girl, lilly, hangs herself on the very day he gets out of his three-month sentence, so that when he arrives at her house (since the first thing he did was drive up to see her) she's already dead.

it, as the most stabbingly painful epilogue among a sea of sad "here's what happened to them" tales at the end, moves the book from feel-good to grand tragedy.

but he never spent those months in prison, so he was free to see lilly whenever he wanted.

that's got nothing to do with the myth of authenticity tho.

I'm glad you're making the argument that Truth is "essential to the very design" of the book because that's the only point at which these innaccuracies could become potentially problematic; you're making the distinction that I feel I've been asking for all along.

So James Frey is appearing on Oprah this afternoon, but we’re lucky to have an honest-to-God sneak preview for you (the show is taping live, right now, in Chicago). We’ll keep updating this post as the show progresses.

Oprah opens the show by saying she’s sorry; she also apologizes for calling Larry King to defend Frey. And then the kicker: Oprah says to Frey, “You betrayed millions of readers.” Remember how we said Oprah had totally saved Frey’s ass? Yeah, not anymore.

After commerical, Frey appears. Of the Smoking Gun report that broke this story, Frey says they “did a good job.” He admits to Oprah that he lied to her about jail. “I made a mistake,” he says.

Oprah’s not satisfied and keeps pushing. Frey admits that Lilly didn’t hang herself; claims that in reality she cut her wrist. “Why did you have to lie about that?” responds Oprah.

Update: Frey says, “I don’t think it is a novel — it’s a memoir.” When he says he wrote the book from memory, the audience actually boos him. “I have been really embarrassed by this,” says Oprah.

On the documents Frey refuses to share, Oprah asks, “Where are they?” She’s really angry. Regarding the dentist incident: “What is true?” Frey responds, “I have no idea if I had Novocaine.”

Frey says that he’s struggled with the book, to which Oprah retorts, “No, the lie of it.” The audience claps (OPRAH WE LOVE YOU YAY OMG!). She goes back to the root canal issue, he says he doesn’t know. Oprah’s visibly pissed; it’s almost painful.

More ass-kicking after the jump.

Update 2: In a taped interview, Maureen Dowd says Oprah should revoke her Book Club seal.

Publisher Nan Talese shows up, claims she’s had a root canal without novocaine. Considering that was likely in 1957, we don’t know how this helps Frey’s case.

Talese claims to have learned about the inaccuracies in Frey’s book at the same time as everyone else, through the Smoking Gun report. “But should I ask more questions?” she stupidly asks. “YES!” says Oprah. Duh.

Talese says this “whole experience has been sad.” Oprah snaps back, “It’s not sad for me. It’s embarrassing.”

Oprah’s people were contacted by someone from the Hazelden clinic days after the book was picked. This person questioned the book, so Oprah had her people contact Talese. Talese’s team backed up it up and said Frey’s book was “non-fiction.” More TK.

Update 3: After the commercial break, Richard Cohen from the Washington Post cozies up on the couch with Frey and Talese. Of the book’s beginning, in which Frey claims to be incredibly mangled en route to his parents, Cohen says, “How’d this guy get on an airplane? I can’t get on with a third piece of luggage.”

Oprah, more calm but still pissed, asks Frey, “Do you think you made a mistake or lied?” Frey answers, “Probably both.” Yes, James, PROBABLY.

Unreal: Now Frank Rich is here! He notes that this is all “amazing television.” Insightful…

Update 4: Now Rich and Cohen are discussing the issues surrounding Oprah’s latest pick, Night, and whether it is to be read as truth or fiction. Some journalism scholar comes out to pontificate, but everyone falls asleep.

Frey is still onstage, but he’s been relatively quiet since Talese came out. Talese’s phone rings onstage. Live television is awesome.

Oprah asks Frey if he could do things over, would he want a disclaimer in the book? He says no, but he would’ve written things “differently.”

Update 5: The show is wrapping up. Oprah has tamed her angry inner Harpo. She says to Frey, “I appreciate you being here. It is a difficult time and I hope you were joking about there being a gun backstage—not worth that. [Ed: Uh, WTF?] Just come clean and that begins the process. Maybe the beginning of another truth…”

Frey responds, “It hasn’t been a great day/week but I come out better and admit to lying. And that’s not easy.”

In the last moments, Frey is asked about anything else he wants to come clean on. He says he really did board a plan looking like a bloody mess; when he left rehab he was with only one person, not two. Claims that there are no other major issues. Well, that’s good, because if there were any more “major issues” with this, we’d expect every existing copy of the damn book to spontaneously burst into flames.

And scene. Later this afternoon, we’ll provide some photographic documentation of the Angry Oprah in her natural environment.

If accurate, so beautiful.

society's fault? no. YOU PLAYED YOURSELF

More fun from Gawker.

And I can see how people felt betrayed by Frey, reading his book as truth, trusting him, but hell, HE WAS A DRUG ADDICT. But maybe it's not common knowledge that drug addicts are (or become) incredible liars - and in living that way lose the ability to differentiate between truth and lies - that is, this differentiation doesn't matter, the reason to lie justifies the lie. Only the end result (drugs/getting high) matters. This also applies to chronic liars, who could be anyone, anywhere. I didn't read the book (I read several pages and just didn't like the writing style), but I figured when I first heard about it (before Oprah endorsement) that a) it'd be full of exaggeration, and b) people would eat it up. Worse things have been done in the name of making money, holy crap. At least this time, the person in question was called on it publicly.

Lying is bad, the show concludes - the truth matters. Oh, you can make up a story, but tell us it's a story before we buy into it. Okay... I think we kind of expect to be lied to these days, with this political and media climate. Yet we still love the "truth" - reality tv, investigative reporting, crime lab forensics, discovering the terrorist who's infiltrated the group, etc. Many people live in constant suspicion - and that's draining. So when we're given stories such as this, which are said to be true (and backed up by Oprah!), we almost want to believe in those MORE because we're believing in everything else LESS. And in letting our guard down, we invite emotional intimacy - in doing that we could be subject to emotional manipulation as well. Sometimes we get hurt. Ohgod, and we don't wanna get hurt. The crazy fascinating thing is how this fits into current issues of personal and national safety and fear. This small incidents, especially when they get so much press, show us there's always something bigger going on, more dots to connect, more, well, pieces to put into place.

hm. bit of a rant day for me. i'm getting into one about that Strapped book too ohno agh.

but the thing is we don't even know that. i tend to doubt it.

haha, yeah re: Talese, that seemed pretty clear. ew, sigh, etc.

(I am very very sorry for the visual of Oprah doing such a thing ew)

Geek readers will always get hooked by geek writers, you can't do much about it. Most of the ppl who blindly dig on the modern _____ gauntlet survivor angle don't have a functioning rugged radar and catch feelings way too easily on corny, suspect, utterly mildsauce tales/style. If you're trying to get by on gutter points, that studenty barometer doesn't mean shit but to the students. My rugged radar is not what it used to be but still, when I saw, for example, the segue edits in Tarnation (the Stabbing Westward-video jump-cut angsty bits) my cornball alarm blew up and I was like EAT SHIT EAT SHIT I DON'T RESPECT YR HUSTLE ANYMORE (didn't mind the rest of the movie). And fuck a Suffering Opera without a sense of humor.

wasn't his sister pissed off by that book?

funnily enough, the preface to paperback edition I have says "For all the author's blusters elsewhere, this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for varying purposes."
Eggers gets points for Oprah avoidance though.

So she's like the other Osbourne sibling, then.

However, we still are not fully cleansed of evil.

oprah: "lies?"

...

except she killed herself two years ago.

Where's Alex in NYC? Doesn't he have a friend who wrote some beautifully-designed memoir about being a white boy in private school? At least Holden Caufield was imaginary.

that's right.

Seems a tad bit arrogant to be writing a memoir before you're even middle aged, doesn't it?

xpost gypsy capitalize "Whip Handle" and "Rectum" and maybe "Thrash Me" and for sure "Problem" and you're in the money, baby

this is a really interesting question - I do think that the outing of frauds is a literary/cultural fad that springs up from time to time & that the public's interest in it waxes & wanes, though I'm not the man to say what the arising of such a trend might mean

I don't think it's a case of people falling whole-hog for memoirs as being relentless fact documentation but rather they expect it to be at least SORT OF true. Hence the amazing scandal. I mean plenty of autobiographies have been called out for inaccuracies before (see Eggers, Jarhead upthread) but this seems v. above and beyond, and the fact that dude was walking around talking about how real he was compounds the issue.

Q: What is the worst lie you've ever told?
A: No way I can answer that.

the guy i know says he never did this, but it was widespread practice at the paper. i think there's probably less of that now, what with the professionalization of the trade and everyone having ethics classes in college and so forth, but i bet it used to happen a lot.

Regardless, the main difference between them and whomever is that they got caught. People who get caught, regardless of time period AFAIK, get fired. You can't afford to have a big scandal like that if you're supposed to be bringing people the hardcore facts. So I really don't think those things are indicitive of some kind of new culture of truthmongering brought about by our lyin' prez. I mean, I don't think that many people were very outraged by Jayson Blair or Dan Rather, actually (to the point I was actually surprised Rather resigned, least of which because he wasn't the one who made the shit up, he was just the moron who fell for it).

i'm sure this will haunt me at my confirmation hearing.

HA! didn't Dave Barry start out that way, being sent to some big national political convention(Nixon's?), and opting instead to stay in his hotel room and make it up there. Or was it P.J. O'rourke?

xpost:

hell yeah, i agree. it just seems like a new way to use gossip to get political storylines out there(e.g. Drudge) that regular media types focus upon

http://www.gocollect.com/images/WaltDisneyArtClassics/200/1230080.jpg

I am writing this one for myself. So it doesn't really matter what you believe or don't believe. What you want to believe you want to believe. If I am the devil incarnate then I am the devil incarnate.

This one is for me.

As I write this, I have hit the road again. You see, I can download this stuff, and then upload it anywhere I hit a hot spot. I love the new technology. Boom. You can make it real.

I am putting some distance between myself and the people I love. I owe them that. I am poison to just about any life I have ever touched. You can trust me on that one.

Any good piece of writing has to go immediately for the jugular. Where is the time in life for anything less. Life. Death. Period.

YAWN.

suck it Raleigh! West Durham 4 LIFE!!

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/brooklyn_librarians_freys_a_fiction_writer_31503.asp

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TDS-Oprah-RealWorld.wmv

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/01/31.html#a6940

Looks like Nan's spent the last year and a half brooding.

;_;

It's a trend:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child who went on to live a gang-banger’s violent life, wielding guns and running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret P. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in well-to-do Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley of California, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

This doesn't bode well for the book I'm writing about growing up an half-Eskimo hunchback tranny opium-addict assassin:-(

You're not?

buy the book!

i blame reality tv. people want to read about "real" things, so (would-be) novelists are just trying to deliver what the people want.

it's totally heartbreaking

that was an x-post but it still applies!

Yeah I for one definitely want privileged white people pretending to be minorities from fucked up backgrounds. xpost

aw i want my own fake memoir

now accepting treatments /ghost-writer applications!

I got one! You were orphaned very young in the jungle, and raised by apes.

at some point i should be the leader of a japanese teen motorcycle gang - plz include that in yr pitch thx

wholesome black girl form arkansas get scholarship to NYU, begins downward spiral of cocaine addiction and anonymous craigslist gangbangs.

Jhøshea: Tokyo Drift

lol thats exactly waht i was thinking

picture this: tokyo drift with motorcycles - so do we have a deal or what

CHAPTER 1

I woke to the drone of a motorcycle engine and something dripping down my chin. I was in the middle of the Biggest Race of my Life, and I had just been sidelined by the famous Yakuza Yoshihiro Makamoto.

Can't wait for tragic addiction to prescription drugs!

Get a really beautiful and colorful yet simplistic photograph for the cover and it is on like Donkey Kong! Use a sans serif typeface in white!

Rally of the Dolls

japanese cops dont look kindly upon an army brat trying to score his fix in tokyos teaming night-club district - believe you me

Fuck Oprah, though. You or a stand-in should only do Charlie Rose or Tavis Smiley.

Or wait until Bill Cosby's upcoming revival of Graffiti Rock.

http://daytimetalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/mondayontyra-1.jpg

jhoshea can we add some mopar beef to the story? like a sharks 'n' jets thing only one the one side there's you, driftin away on a scraped-up Ninja or something, and on the other there's a bunch of gnarly dudes in GTOs

xpost

Now we're talking.

CHAPTER 6

I was shaking as I Finally Opened the Baggie and shook it out on my Spoon. Yuki stared at me. "Jhøshea," she cried, in Japanese, "the Tokyo Final Underground Grand Prix is tomorrow!" She was naked.

im pushing this firmly into custos territory

god, what would tyra say about that photo if it flashed up during judging on antm

Spoon

mopar beef!!!

yah john i like it - thats an excellent stage-setting for my second act as a black-market real-estate broker in yeltsin's moscow

now that the yokudtuka controlled the kedimine trade the scene had gotten just too hot. and with yuki dead there was nothing left for me so i headed west. little did i know that within three months i'd be stalking moscows toniest enclaves caring an attache case bulging with euros protected by only my wits and two 150 kilo bodyguards.

I will write the soundtrack on spec, just so you know

deal

"kedimine"?

(sic)

ahhhh fuck you, I've had dibs on the ketamine angle for my fake memoir since like, the week after the whole james frey thing broke.

damn, i'm reserving my copy NOW

k-hole: a very special memoir

my fake memoir would be called "bill cosby thinks I'm gay." it would be about how this one time bill cosby misunderstood a backstage altercation between me and Malcolm-Jamal Warner and ever since has been really awkward around me at social events, so now I try to make him even more uncomfortable by putting my hand on his knee, eating sausages, etc.

There are cities, and then there's Moscow.

I don't have a title for mine yet but my working subtitle is "The Authorized Story of an Unauthorized Life"

Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host

now that the yokudtuka controlled the kedimine trade the scene had gotten just too hot. and with yuki dead there was nothing left for me so i headed west. little did i know that within three months i'd be stalking moscows toniest enclaves caring an attache case bulging with euros protected by only my wits and two 150 kilo bodyguards.

-- jhøshea, Tuesday, March 4, 2008 4:14 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

you totally need to have a part about your grueling stint in Russian prison and your rise to the top of the pecking order.

Nude tattoo fights

You end up being one of the few bad-asses with both Russian and Yakuza tattoos.

lol x-post

the infamous cell block five was where i met serge, administrator of the largest and most exclusive illegal listing database in all post-soviet russia.

the infamous cell block five was where i met serge

Pronounced 'sir-gay.'

CHAPTER 18

I woke up with my hands tied behind my back to the sound of an air conditioner humming. my jaw was still sore from the beating the hunchback had given me. immediately my eyes focused on the small silhouette in the doorway standing next to the nigerian eunuch. when it stepped forward into the light, i squinted, unable to believe my eyes. "yuki...?" i stammered, blood spurting out of my mouth.

still more believable than 1st chapter of frey's book

i watched as my mouth-blood pooled onto the brand-new surface-heated imported bamboo floors of the 25th floor luxury loft-condo of one of moscows most exclusive landmark buildings.

at least you're not on a plane in that condition

yuki knelt over my bruised body and stroked my chin. "jhøshea," she said, in perfect russian, "im sorry it has come to this." she held a gun to my temple and cocked the trigger.

yuki's gotta snort coke off a dick at some point dudes

the guy in the hump is actually an interpol agent

i couldnt believe it, this was my turf, no-mo; i made this neighborhood. i knew the eunuch wasnt trustworthy, i just didnt think he had the balls to pull some shit like this. i guess its simple when youve got the hunchback standing tall for you...

i heard a gunshot, and closed my eyes tightly, as tight as i closed them the first time i sucked a dick for kedimine. to my shock, i wasnt dead. i opened them again, as wide as i opened them the first time i shot up, and saw yukis fragile oriental body lying limp on the oriental rug. what had happened? i thought. then i saw the sniper in the window of the building across the beautiful and cold russian avenue

I didn't know what exactly what had just happened, but I knew one thing: I I had to leave Moscow. Sure,Mother Russia had been good to me, but I couldn't suckle at her vodka-soaked teat any longer. Things were just too heavy.

The sniper's bullet grazed my ear as I rolled out of view, the sudden burst of adrenalin overcoming the kedimine. I was now lying flat on my stomach on the floor across from Yuki. Her dead eyes stared at me, wide as the day we first met.

Pinned down like one of Nabakov's butterflies, I was trapped with nowhere to run. The sniper's laser sight was scanning the room, looking for me.

And I was still high.

Suddenly, out of nowhere I felt a vibration coming from my pocket. My pager. Who the fuck was paging me at a time like this? I took it out of my pocket and looked at the message. THROW ME, it said. I looked across the room, past the laser sight sweeping the rug. Only a few yards away from Yuki's corpse was the door to the hallway.

I hurled the pager at the laser sight and leaped across the room just as the sniper fired. The door was unlocked. I hastily exited the room just as the sniper fired again, hitting the door.

It seemed I had a guardian angel looking out for me.

How had AllOfMP3.com come to this?

suddenly it hit me: where was the eunuch? suddenly i felt a huge hand grab the back of my neck, lifting me off the ground, high, but not in the way i was high on kedimine. i grabbed for my stiletto knife, but the hunchback had disarmed me. i was now at the mercy of the big ball-less freak, holding me in the stairwell of the oldest brothel in moscow.

More for a new day.

(Meanwhile, a roffle:

Margaret Seltzer's literary agent, Faye Bender, declined to comment.

"I'm so sorry, I can't be a part of it. I'm running out" the door, she said.

That is some of the weirdest quote placement I've ever seen.

Guys, you are basically writing this book:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/bestselling-sci-fi-fantasy-2007/2811-1.jpg

I should know, I just read it like three weeks ago. Can mail to most enthusiastic poster...?

Brent Ghelfi = clearly a made-up name.

how did i miss this??

It gets better:

Margaret B Jones Seltzer, the fake memoirist du jour, has included, in her stories of growing up in gangland, the fact that she's stayed involved with the community via a nonprofit called International Brother/SisterHood. The extent of that involvement -- and what that nonprofit is, exactly -- is unclear.

And to tie it back in to the thread topic:

Lying writer James Frey will be damned if he is going to miss an opportunity to milk literary deception for all it's worth, so he's already launched a new publicity campaign, less than 48 hours after newb lying writer Margaret Seltzer got the whole country talking about fake autobiographers again. Of course it's probably just a total coincidence that Frey chose now to launch the new blog where most of the text is copied from other sites, where Frey posts a purported lesbian fantasy video (so not worth it) and where he of course promotes his million-dollar-plus novel the name of which is not important.

Mongrels were so ahead of the curve on this trend.

Anyone going to pick up Bright Shiny Morning?

too many books around to waste time on this one

What he said.

I read My Friend Leonard so I guess I will read this, there is no saving face or time for me.

the vanity fair piece on him this month was pretty sympathetic and makes a pretty fair case that portraying the first book as a memoir was not his idea and was forced by the publishers. it was submitted to 18 publishing houses as fiction first and turned down by all of them.

this guy just seems like a d-bag, esp how he used the "memoir" to turn himself into a tough guy who survived the scourge of drugs (that shit is boring and sad when i hear about it in conversations/in ilx posts too)

james frey king of ilxors casually mentioning illicit activities

more like king of self-mythologizing ilxors, yes?

if you read that vanity fair article though--he was sort of pushed into calling it a memoir by his publisher. He first submitted the book as a novel. Yeah blah blah blah he's a douche, I kind of agree, but I'm glad he got the good review this morning in the NYT, maybe people can start to forget what a clusterfuck the who;e tjomg was.

During the publishing process, Frey, it seems, still had some misgivings about putting the book out there as a memoir. On an “author’s questionnaire,” a memo used for marketing and publicity that authors fill out a few months prior to publication, he wrote, “I think of this book more a work of art or literature than I do a work of memoir or autobiography.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/06/frey200806

and i haven't read any of his books nor do i want to--i just think dude got totally hosed.

I'm glad he got the good review this morning in the NYT

For a good review it kept making me think, "She doesn't like this book at all, does she?"

I thought that too. Maybe the idea of this guy's redemption was too good to let go.

He is a total d-bag but not just cause 'look at me I smoked crack.'

Well I am mainly judging him a D-bag going on his autobiographical portrayal in Leonard, however accurate that one was intended to be...

for all his whining that the publisher made him market it as a memoir the fictional elements are what changed a pitiful drug addict into the tragic tough guy - s douche move w/o the fake memoir scandal

btw im a big supporter of the fake memoir genre in general

i kind of want to read the "i was a refugee from a nazi camp and raised by wolves" one

My own memoir, Oing Oing: A Redemption Story, is selling briskly

He is a total d-bag but not just cause 'look at me I smoked crack.'

'look at me i smoked crack' totally should have been the title

For a good review it kept making me think, "She doesn't like this book at all, does she?"

Having never read anything of Frey's, it had me thinking, "Is Janet Maslin recovering from a stroke?"

Dictating, post-tracheotomy.

she's imitating Frey's style, guys. i've never read anything of Frey's and i figured it out too.

That much was obvious!

i'm with you Ned. when i first read it, i thought, Wow rave review. But now that i think about it, there's something weird about reviewing a book in the author's style. Michiko does it sometimes, too, but it's usually when she's panning something.

I mean, if she was trying to warm my heart to the style of the book, she not only didn't succeed, she made me barf.

i am sorry that you barfed. perhaps you should write a memoir about the time you read the NYT and barfed?

i am sorry that you barfed.

I am trying not to barf my heart

i cant make my barf turn into a heart oing oing oing

haha has max ever read almost transparent blue?

"Ken, he stabbed his brother, I think maybe it was his brother, but he didn't die, and he came to the bar a little while back."

I gazed through the wine glass at the light bulb. Inside the smooth glass sphere the filament was dark orange.

"He said he'd asked you about me, Lilly, so watch your mouth, OK? Don't tell too much to weird guys like that."

Lilly finished the wine that had been set down among the lipsticks and brushes and various bottles and boxes on the dressing table, then right there in front of me she slipped off her gold lamé slacks. The elastic left a line on her stomach. They said Lilly had done fashion modeling, once.

On the wall hung a framed photo of her in a fur coat. She told me it was chinchilla and cost I don't know how many thousands. One time, when it was cold, she'd come to my room, her face pale as a corpse; she'd shot up too much Philopon. With a rash around her mouth, shaking violently, she'd fallen in as soon as she'd opened the door.

The LA Times feels rather differently:

Frey seems to know little about Los Angeles and to have no interest in it as a real place where people wrestle with actual life. There are obligatory riffs on freeways and natural disasters and a chapter on visual artists that lists "the highest price ever paid for a piece of their work in a public auction." There are also occasional installments of "Fun Facts" about the city, as if to give the illusion of a certain depth. Did you know that it is "illegal to lick a toad within the city limits of Los Angeles"? Neither did I. But I also don't know what this has to do with the larger story of the novel, except as another example of L.A. as odd and quirky, a territory in which we all "live with Angels and chase their dreams."

Now, if this story about him being FORCED to push it as a memoir is true, I might have some more respect for this guy, but that would mean that he's approaching the zero point where he was prior to Oprah's big reveal.

The only thing I've heard is that, if you have any friends, many or few, who have let things get away from them at one point or another, or if you have, the book is tedious. So, no thank you.

As for yet another L.A. as "a place with real people, oh my god" book, get a fucking grip. L.A. is Detroit with a beach and mountains. That doesn't mean that I don't absolutely love it - I have grown to really like it here - but its a REAL city. Dirty as hell, crime - state sanctioned or otherwise, segregated but with the natural friction that comes with such a ridiculous diversity of people crammed into one place, all chasing their one, common god - loot.

This is not to say that I would be ambivalent about choosing Detroit or L.A. - fuck a Michigan winter.

I mean, if she was trying to warm my heart to the style of the book, she not only didn't succeed, she made me barf.

Yeah, I've never read Frey, but it's hard for me to believe that such a ridiculous prose style could yield a bestseller - so either Maslin's a poor imitator or Frey really is awful.

i could believe both

The goof in repose:

JAMES FREY was back in his old neighborhood, strolling happily along the Venice boardwalk, enjoying a sunny day in a T-shirt and aviator shades as he passed tattoo shops and a man who was selling what he claimed to be "philosophy." It doesn't get any better than this, Frey's body language seemed to say.

"This," Frey, 38, said. "This doesn't exist in New York. This weather -- it's like this in Venice all year. Never that hot here because of the ocean. I mean, dude, every day -- all year."

That's when he bumped into an old neighbor, who still lives across from the house where Frey wrote the 2003 book, "A Million Little Pieces."

"Jesus! I thought you won the Nobel Prize for literature!" shouted Marvin Klotz, a retired English professor, hanging out on a bench with some friends. He'd seen all the recent press. "Newsweek! Time! Vanity Fair!"

"Washington Post, I got a good one," said Frey, who talks through his nose with a bored-guy flatness.

Frey could have been just another local boy made good. Then Klotz, a dead ringer for Jerry Garcia and Albert Einstein, introduced the writer to another friend as "the disgraced James Frey!"

"The most notorious author in America," Frey offered, smiling his crooked smile.

They all cracked up, laughing in the seaside sun.

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2008/05/dept-of-that-ex.html#comments

DEPT. OF THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING
This morning I was watching James Frey (I know, it's a sickness, I don't know why I do this to myself) on Tagged, Barnes & Noble's "weekly video series about what's new in the world of books" and nearly spit up my coffee when he made this stunning revelation: He doesn't read his own work. Ever.

Host Molly Pesce was aking him about his process and he answered that he writes 9 to 5. "I think of what I do as a job. Just like anybody else goes to work. I do." (A regular lunch-bucket guy that James Frey.)

But the shocker came when Pesce asked if he ever looked at his work the next day and went "blech!" (An astute reader that Molly Pesce). Here's what Frey had to say:

I don't ever read what I write. You know. I don't read it while I'm writing. I don't read it when I'm done. I've never--except for public events--I've never read my first two books. I've never read that one. I never will. I don't have really any interest.

Just what we all wanted:

James Frey, the author of “A Million Little Pieces” and “Bright Shiny Morning,” is working with another writer and anonymously shopping a young adult novel called “I Am Number Four.”

A source familiar with the project said that Mr. Frey, who was famously caught embellishing details in “A Million Little Pieces,” his memoir of drug addiction and recovery, came up with the idea of what is proposed as a six book series and is working with another writer to pen the actual text.

R.I.P. Jaybob

Oh for the days of controversies this small