The Smoking Gun website is reporting that a popular book recommended by Oprah, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, is full of lies, distortions, and inaccuracies. Anyone else hear about this? He better run for the border if it's true. -Dave

There's a bit of a trend to fictionalize memoirs. Autobiography has never been the most trustworthy of genres, and there's always a question of just how much a person says about themselves should be considered fiction.

But increasingly I hear about personal narratives and memoirs fudging and inventing things for the sake of sensationalizing and sales. The authors aren't always apologetic, either. Some consider the personal memoir more a work of art than of history.


-Andy

I think it's hilarious--I particularly like how his stories don't at all jive with police reports which list his as drunk but very cooperative. I must admit I haven't read the book, but it seems that Frey may have read a bit too much Irvine Welsh or Hunter S. Thompson or something. Who knows.

INteresting stuff at the Smoking Gun.

I'm reminded of Julie Powell's disclaimer at the beginning of her Julie & Julia memoir that included the line, "Also, sometimes I just made sh*t up." In retrospect, it seems like a smart move on her part to let her readers know up front that her memoir was part truth, and part artistic license. Reading her book, it didn't matter too much to me what was cold hard fact and was embellishment. I liked her writing and the story she told. But at least I knew ahead of time that some of what I would be reading wasn't be true. I don't think anyone can complain in that case.

Is night , Eli Wiesel's holocaust memoir

A wonderful choice.

Night is a fabulous choice, my only fear is that people will just pick it up because it is short & expect a "light read." Night is anything but...I'm not sure it's the kind of fare Oprah's audience will enjoy. Then again, this is the woman who chose the Sound and the Fury.

Still there will be a wide audience, because even though the response to Faulkner was Tepid for Oprah Standards, the 3 book series still sold 300,000 copies.

Good lawd, she put the smack down on him today.

Here's a huge irony for you:

Oprah has disavowed this guy's memoir, but Martha Beck, one of Oprah's chums and a columnist both for O Magazine and Oprah's website, has published at least two memoirs, both riddled with falsehoods. Her accounts have been contested by every member of her family and by her ex-husband. (Her ex-husband actually says that she wrote her first memoir as fiction, but it was continually rejected until she claimed, without making significant changes, that it was non-fiction.)

But since her lies can't be revealed as easily as this guy's were with police records, I don't expect Oprah to stop perpetrating this gross double-standard. (Though she did scale back her promotion of Beck's book, she continues to feature Beck.)

Bottom line for me: always keep a sliver of doubt when reading autobiography. And if the author calls it a memoir, treat it with outright skepticism. People don't always tell the truth when they're talking about themselves. They're even more likely to lie when they put it in writing.

-Andy

I watched the Oprah show yesterday. It was brutal, yet riveting.

I don't know this Frey guy. If A Million Little Pieces is anything like his second book (My Friend Leonard, which I perused), I'm not interested.

The question of what, exactly, constitutes a memoir hasn't been resolved to my satisfaction. If you look at Chuck Barris's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (which I own), on the back cover you'll see Memoir/Film to the left of the price. As well as the following: "Chuck Barris is a former television executive and host of The Gong Show. He is the author of several books and is currently writing a sequel to his memoir."

So there, again, is that word: memoir.

If you're familiar with the book, you know that in it Barris claims he was a CIA agent and has a number of kills under his belt. No one I know believes this to be true. Still, it's amusing.

Admittedly, Frey's embellishments are less amusing.

I don't think it's a question of Barris being crazy, of him believing he was a CIA agent.

It's either true or he made it up. The latter seems more likely.

Barris, unlike Frey, was smart enough to make something up that's difficult to disprove.

It doesn't bother me that they label Confessions of a Dangerous Mind memoir, as that seems a better fit than fiction.

Nobody complained about "Confessions" because we know Barris from The Gong Show, we know the guy's a goof, and we know he's out to make us laugh.

Frey, on the other hand, comes out of nowhere and uses Oprah to become famous ("When I walk into Random House, they treat me like a rock star"). Of course people are going to be pissed off.

The sad thing to me is that everyone rushes to buy a book that O.W says is so good. Can't we make up our mind, or do we need her to OK everything we do in life? We've made her a guru, and this man just took advantage of her arrogance. I loved it when she complained to Larry King that she couldn't get through his phone lines when Frey was on, then when she was on, she gushed all over Frey as to how wonderful his book was, and that she wasn't put off by the bad publicity. (A week later, she was sorry about all of that, and was against Frey). Such is life, but how sad that such an event is considered news.