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James Frey and Doubleday's bad marketing decision, the impact on the memoir genre, and the strange
public that continues to support him
by Amanda Sledz
Bitter Nonfiction Writer Seeking a Sincere Apology from this Self-Serving Ninny
ordinary.” This is apparently also a line out of author James Frey’s everyday life. Thanks to the Smoking Gun, we now
know that the author of bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces lived a pretty average upper-class life: he grew up as a
moderately popular student in a Midwest town, and then went on to attend an elite and expensive liberal arts college.
After taking the initiation rights of his fraternity a little too seriously, he developed a drug and alcohol problem that
landed him a stint in rehab. Frey was never in jail – which, of course, also means that he probably didn’t have a suicidal
girlfriend, or at the very least one he couldn’t reach due to his incarceration. He never committed a crime that earned
him anything other than a ticket, he wasn’t haunted by a bad reputation, and people weren’t gossiping about his hell-
raising antics. In fact, people weren’t talking about James Frey at all; at least, not until he made himself more interesting.
Raised in a reality-television saturated environment, we’ve come to understand that the only way to connect with others
is through mass-market communication. Apparently, Frey decided that instead of trying out for the Bachelor or Survivor,
he would write a memoir. All the kids are doing it, and so long as he makes his story more melodramatic than the last
drug memoir, he might just have a hit on his hands. Gloves off, this is a classic case of a self-serving, opportunistic
parasite submitting a book as fiction and then changing it to non, if that’s what it takes to get away with bad writing.
In the old days, when revealing too much truth could lead to the sort of persecution and isolation few would welcome, the
opposite route was taken: write about yourself and call it fiction. Works by Dostoevsky, Hemmingway, Sylvia Plath, Ken
Kesey, Elizabeth Smart, and George Orwell (to name a few) would have been taken quite differently if they had opted to
instead say: fine. This is the truth. Of course, many of these writers, in particular George Orwell, also wrote reams of
nonfiction, and disguised their fiction so thinly that they wound up dealing with persecution and backlash anyway. In
modern times, the opposite is true: Frey disguised his fiction writing so thinly as nonfiction that it would take
the intentional application of emotional blinders to not see the glaring untruths within.
Now the question remains: should Frey be forgiven, as many fiction writers have been, for essentially lying to
the public? In considering the impact this might have on an how readers interact with any book or essay in the creative
nonfiction genre, A Million Little Pieces should neither be forgiven nor celebrated, but treated with the same
level of contempt and rejection we’d offer an overly-imaginative journalist who manipulates a reader with
half-truths for the sake of a byline. If opinions offered by jilted fans serve as any insight, there’s already a suspicion
that memoirs contain half-truths, and only an utter rejection of this kind of marketing ploy can assure the public that this
is not the case.
In fairness, memoir is not the easiest genre to pin down, as Frey himself pointed out to Larry King and rabidly irritated
Oprah fans. He explained that memoir is a relatively “new” genre, and that there’s still flexibility with regards to how it can
be defined and interpreted, and that it, “most of all, it literally means my story.”
Well, sort of. It’s not a relatively new genre. Picking up a copy of Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay or The
Best American Essays of the Century edited by Joyce Carol Oates will teach him that. The semi-scandalous celebrity
style memoir (written by non-celebrities) could be considered new, if you eliminated sex and drugs confessions written by
folks like Jacques Menetre and the Marques De Sade. True, one could define memoir as “my story,” but that doesn’t
mean it’s not supposed to be true - especially when it’s exhaustively marketed as “honest” and “true.”
According to the Smoking Gun article, Frey told Cleveland's Plain Dealer in a May 2003 interview that the book was
straight nonfiction, claiming that his publisher, Doubleday, "contacted the people I wrote about in the book. All the events
depicted in the book checked out as factually accurate. I changed people's names. I do believe in the anonymity part of
AA. The only things I changed were aspects of people that might reveal their identity. Otherwise, it's all true."
In the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, the word “memoir” points you to “autobiography,” and
this dictionary claims that, “an autobiography may be largely fictional” (63). It then goes on to explore the
complexities of relying upon a single individual to accurately portray events. Compare autobiography to writing an article
or essay while relying on a single primary source for all information. Unless a writer can 100% verify the integrity of that
single source, other primary and secondary sources would be needed to take the article seriously. Unfortunately (or
conveniently) for Frey, much of the details about his life are unverifiable, as a majority of the individuals he writes about
have died or gone missing prior to publication. Frey could have used this loose definition as support for his "my story"
argument, if he had not, once again, repeatedly stressed the “truthfulness” and “honesty” of his book as major selling
points. After all, it’s possible for people to still be interested in Magic Potion if it’s marketed as bonified
snake oil (guaranteed to fool your friends!), but finding out it's snake oil after shelling out $24.95 leads to
problems.
The American Heritage Dictionary (2000 Edition), which seems like a book more likely to live on the shelves of an
average household, offers the following options for definitions:
Memoir An account of the personal experiences of an author.
1. An autobiography. Often used in the plural.
2. A biography or biographical sketch.
3. A report, especially on a scientific or scholarly topic.
4. The report of the proceedings of a learned society.
Philip Lopate offers an extensive definition of so-called creative nonfiction writing, or the personal essay, in the intro to
The Art of the Personal Essay. There he explains that “the personal essayist must above all be a reliable
narrator; we must trust his or her core of sincerity” (xxvi). This means being willing to question oneself every step
of the way, to backtrack and supply necessary information to fill out the story for the reader. This means having the
integrity to publish your book as fiction if it's fiction, and nonfiction if it's nonfiction.
Memoirists have offered strong response to Frey’s assertion that a fragment of “emotional truth” relieves one from the
responsibilities of telling the actual truth. In a Canadian Press article, Mary Karr, author of the memoirs The Liars Club
and Cherry said:
"With three million books in print, that's a very convenient stance for Doubleday to take," Assuming the allegations are
correct, she said, Frey has "the moral credibility of a sea mollusk" for fabricating his work.
A memoir, Karr said, is exceedingly difficult to write, even when you think you have all your facts straight. "You're a
solitary voice, telling a life story as truthfully as you can," she said. "Even when you think (your memories) are true, you
have to peck and push and nudge yourself," she said. "Is that right? Could it have really happened that way?"
There are, of course, some liberties taken by memoirists, even those with well-documented reputations like Karr.
However, I doubt many readers would be upset to learn that a writer’s 1965 conversation with Aunt Matilda was not
transcribed verbatim, or that the angry homeless guy actually threw his right shoe down the street every day at 3 AM
instead of his left shoe at 4 AM. Perfect memory is a characteristic of an idiot savant, not the average writer, and certain
changes have to be made for the sake of protecting those close to the author. All that is expected of a memoirist is that
the events described are as true as the author remembers. The sad fact is: Frey knows that what he wrote is not
true, though he’s chosen to use the word “embellished” as opposed to “fiction” or the even more honest
“oops, I thought no one was looking.”
Frey could also argue that he responded to publisher pressure placed on memoirists to produce something more
stomach-turning, ugly, and “true” than the last writer. An eye-scan of nonfiction shelves reads like a pissing contest
between publishers to see who can make the reader most visibly wince between paragraphs. The more an author
responds to this pressure, the less authentic he or she becomes, and the more likely to “take liberties” for
the sake of cheap originality. It seems to me this originality should come from style, and if it doesn’t perhaps the
problem is a weak author as opposed to weak subject matter. It seems that Frey chose to plump up his angst instead of
his abilities.
What could have disappeared from the limelight after a little eye-rolling and sighing turned to rage and venom when
Frey chose to mimic the Bush administration after being caught red-handed: whatever you do, keep lying, and claim
people didn’t understand you during that first round of lying. Continue to play blameless victim at all costs, or you might
risk your multi-million dollar condo, and end up living in your parents million dollar basement. Pretty ironic for someone
who apparently touts a “no victimhood” road to redemption.
Meanwhile, the public continues to support an outed literary con-artist, leaving room for a bigger question: why did
anyone believe this in the first place? Do people honestly believe that James Frey, a wealthy white college boy from
sheltered communities in the Midwest, somehow ended up a drug king pin, hooked and running with hard-hitting thugs
straight out of more gruesome Pulp Fiction scenes, prior to graduating from an elite university on time? Does it seem
realistic that, in rehab, (even in glamour rehab) one would make pals with heavyweight boxers and mafia bosses, that
one would get on an airplane covered with blood without being questioned, or that the urban legend of addicts being
denied drugs during dental surgery would turn out to be true? Isn’t there a Tom Hanks movie like that? Why is America
so determined to believe rich white boys every time they talk or write?
Exile reviewer John Dolan responded strongly to this aspect of A Million Little Pieces before the scandal was slapped
into existence when he wrote: “These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the
market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It's a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: the
rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.”
This support of non-truth lends weight to the suspicion that a whole lot of Americans are okay with lying, so long as it’s in
the simplest black and white terms, and what we want to hear. There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Drugs are
always bad, and people who use drugs inevitably fall into down hill disaster mode. People believe him because this is
what people want to believe about drugs. They don’t want to believe the Timothy Leary’s of the world – they want
to believe that your life becomes an utterly devastating mess the moment an illegal substance enters your
blood stream. Nancy Reagan herself couldn’t have written a more thorough anti-drug manifesto.
This should have been the first red flag to the discerning reader. A responsible writer exploring a drug memoir has to
consider the same things someone writing a food memoir would have to consider: some people hate food. Other people
really like food. Because of this, some people get fat. Other people are just gourmands who enjoy food and can eat
delicious food their whole lives without ever gaining a pound. While this is endlessly irritating for people who would like to
overindulge but can’t, it’s still true.
Meanwhile, Doubleday seems determined to confirm the rumor that the publishing industry is nothing more than a paper-
pushing money mill. They’ve come out in support of Frey to basically say that the truthfulness of Frey’s story is
irrelevant, so long as they’re pulling in cash…or rather, that the “emotional truth” continues to hold water. The message
they send the public is this: really, this is what we expect from this genre.
What Doubleday and James Frey seem to want us to learn from this debacle is that memoirists and writers of creative
nonfiction are not to be held to the same standard as journalists, if what they have to say is redemptive. This holds little
weight, as the nonfiction genre doesn’t hold a monopoly on redemption stories, as there are plenty of fiction books and
television shows about exactly that. Lost uses second chances as a central theme, using personal testimonies which are,
for the most part, more believable than Frey's; and this is an island where people are tracked by black clouds of smoke
and kill polar bears with a hand gun.
It’s unfortunate that, of all the wonderful memoirs lining bookshelves, this is the sort the generally receives the most
attention. Writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Art Spiegelman, and Charlotte Delbo have crafted articulate,
important, and utterly excellent nonfiction prose. These writers have been able to pull this off not necessarily because
their lives are extraordinary, but thanks to emotional and intellectual searching, attention to detail, willingness to take
risk, and focus. All of our lives are interesting if our truth is written well.
Books have genres and sub-genres for the sake of letting a reader know what he or she is getting before buying—
you’re not supposed to guess. Until James Frey comes to grips with the true nature of his life, his book should be
relocated to the fiction end of the shelf, for the sake of maintaining the integrity of a genre many people have sacrificed
a lot in order to claim.
Article from the Canadian Press
Interview with rep from the Smoking Gun
Discuss Zori3 Message Board
