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James Frey, true fake?
January 9, 2006
Yesterday, The Smoking Gun posted a brutal exposé of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces that has no doubt reduced the author to a tangle of nerves. Chief among the article's claims is that Frey invented or embellished large parts of his criminal record, which didn't shock me at all. When I plucked the galley from my piles three years ago, I remember rolling my eyes at the press release: here was the uber-recovery memoir, the tell-all to end all tell-alls, complete with sex, drugs, arrests, and a hole in the cheek. If only it had been the last, but in Frey's wake have come plenty of other seedy-sational memoirs, all of which probably contain a fair share of fallacy. Frey will have to face up to his critics sooner or later, but so, too, will his publisher, Nan. A. Talese. I fear what I have for many years: that publishers, under increasing pressure to generate bigger sales, are slacking off in the fact-checking department when it comes to memoirs. Too much is not enough in the genre, and while that philosophy goes down easy with tabloid-bloated Americans, the media has an obligation to print the truth.—Heather McCormack
Posted by on January 9, 2006 | Comments (25)