Secrets of the City

Also noted: On the same day of The Smoking Gun’s story, another literary memoir scandal erupted, that of JT Leroy in the New York Times. Could this will be remembered as the great memoir backlash moment in history?

This reminds me of the time I was King of Croatia.

I’ll be damned! Aimone of Spoleta, aka Tomislav II, the Puppet King. right here in MN! I’d wondered why the Anoka County Court House had signs printed in Croatian?

Is anyone really upset that some of these books were embellished? Fishing stories are better when a couple inches are added to the fish, drug stories more touching with added crazy drug antics.

Agree with Taylor, as they both need liberal doses of “I once had a line THIS BIG!”

I like Ruth Reichl’s line, “Everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual.”

i don’t see what the big deal is. there are far more important things in this world to get upset over. and there’s no doubt that his books have helped people, so isn’t that commendable? he’s not professing to be a dr. phil type “Healer”…he’s just a schmoe who probably stretched the truth to produce a book that people seem to really enjoy. when i heard him read from ‘my friend leonard’ there were so many people there talking about how MLP helped them with their addiction or helped their sons or daughters or other loved ones. to me, that’s more important than if he really was covered in his own blood and bile on an commercial flight from here to there.

i still don’t like the fact that he was on Oprah, though. but these are just my opinions.

The dude peddled this book to sixteen publishers as *fiction* and was rejected. When he labeled it *non-fiction* for the seventeenth publisher, it was accepted. That smacks of more than just embellishment.

honeybun / taylor / rew,

Your wrong. He does council drug addicts, he gives them advice on Oprah. I agree, every memoir is embellished, but his contains outright lies. He has said several times that his books is 100% true, even after being confronted with the facts, go to his website if you want to read it yourself.

If you want to know the truth about his lies, go to http://www.thesmokinggun.com and read about it yourself.

If you want to live in your Oprah-induced fantasy world, just ignore this post.

Matt

Considering, Honeybun, that you frequent a website that spends several threads each day lamenting the loss of the word “Snoopy” from the MOA and the closing of the Quest, it’s pretty ridiculous of you to say “there are far more important things in this world to get upset over.” On MnSpeak we get upset over trivial bullshit every day. Isn’t that why we come here?

more here

“If you want to live in your Oprah-induced fantasy world, just ignore this post.”

I thought that’s what the drugs were for.

matt-

i never said i like Oprah. in fact, i can’t stand her. thanks for assuming i live in an “Oprah-induced fantasy world”, though. keep rockin’ with your bad self, ok?

Fuct-

i’m new here. cut me some slack. heh.

It’s one thing to embellish facts within the pages of a book, but it’s another thing to perpetuate those embellishments in interviews, visits with Oprah, and Amazon author blogs where those embellishments have a totally different affect. But hey, I can’t blame him…addicts for the most part are incredibly boring.

in all the creative writing classes i took, we had many heated debates about this problem. most teachers i had were under the impression that we’re dealing with memories here, and memory is infamously unreliable–and most memoirs are notoriously full of inaccuracies, and sometimes outright fiction. i don’t think it’s ok to pass off fiction as truth, but the “truth” of the situation was that he was profoundly messed up, he doesn’t remember things clearly, and the “truth” to him were these feelings and emotions. it scares me that the publishers turned him down so many times when it was labeled fiction, but then accepted his manuscript labeled as fact (ahhh, sensationalism). that’s a big failing on the publisher’s part, and the book should have had a disclaimer. i suppose once he hit oprah, he figured he better not change his story. either way, it has had the power to help addicts and loved ones of addicts, as well as those looking to read a good story, and whether its fact or fiction shouldn’t change that. i think we also think there’s a big backlash against memoir only because it seems to be the hot genre these days. i just finished reading the book and i thought it was a great work of…faction?

Yeah, I’m a bit surprised that so many people wanna let this slide. This is much more than a “literary hoax” — he practically became a counselor to people.

Plain Layne, anyone?

Plain Layne is a great mention, but that was all fiction. We’re talking about adding a little pizzazz to a story. And I’m sure that Frey (whose book was pretty fair) has as much credibility as an Oprah counselor as other Oprah counselors.

And I like this a lot: “Everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual.”

“in all the creative writing classes i took,”

well there’s your problem right there.

Is Deborah Caulfield Rybak related to Mr. Mayor?

Sister-in-law.

I think A Million Little Pieces was about 15% fact, and about 5% true.

(And, btw, I wrote that Plain Layne story… I interviewed Odin Soli, and I’ll tell you what… there are parts that he contends were “real”… now go figure that one out.)

There is an amazon review from a few months ago of the book that implied that he plagerized both Infinite Jest and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

I really doubt that anyone that watches Oprah has the time to read either of those books.

The portion I think was particularly close is the passage about getting dental work done without anesthesia which happens in Infinite Jest.

“I think A Million Little Pieces was about 15% fact, and about 5% true.”

What was the other 60%?

Well I reread that review and I guess they don’t imply plagerism defacto but a poor rip off of talented writers styles.

I guess I injected personal feeling I had on the work from a collage of various things I have read about the book.

Two updates:

– Random House will refund readers who bought James Frey’s drug and alcohol memoir “A Million Little Pieces” directly from the publisher, a move believed to be unprecedented, after the author was accused of exaggerating his story.

– Frey will be on Larry King tonight. (I’m interested to hear what he has to say, yet watching Larry King makes my skin crawl. Plus, it’s “Project Runway” night.)

“What was the other 60%?”

Excerpts from Mein Kampf.

It matters because there’s enough bullshit in the world as it is without some guy creating more of it just to get a book deal.

When I first read the reviews of this book a couple of months ago I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to write a book about someone that rips off a couple of other books and sells it as his life story and gets to be on Oprah. No lie!

It matters because there’s enough bullshit in the world as it is without some guy creating more of it just to get a book deal.

Oh, I’m sure he already had the deal but he just wasn’t selling the way he wanted to… Everyone knows that the Oprah Cult drives TONS of customers to business.

If anything this guy was just exploiting the Oprah Cult. Wah for the billionaire and her machine getting owned.

Simpleton: Sounds like a good book. I suggest trying to sell it as a memoir.

Great, I read the book and now I’m sober, BASED ON A PACK OF LIES!

Guess i’m going back to Heroin!

thanks a lot James Frey!

Hans at The Rake has a good post on this today

What does it say about readers (and publishers) that a book no one would touch as fiction rides to the top of the bestsellers list as nonfiction?

That’s a good post? God, gimme frey’s fiction over that sobering rant. Hans’ posts read like undergraduate term papers. We worship celebrity — duh.

Editor & Publisher today gives some ink to the Strib’s coverage of the Frey fibs.

This sort of reminds me of Charles Bukowski. At least he fictionalized his life, though.

It matters because there’s enough bullshit in the world as it is without some guy creating more of it just to get a book deal.

Ha! Stephen Glass. That’s hilarious.

Wait a minute — all of this fuss because an admitted drug addict LIED?

Who can tell me he’s absolutely surprised by this?

Bravo to Mr. Frey’s fray. If Oprah hadn’t loved A Million Little Pieces, no one would care about his book and it wouldn’t be hitting the top of the charts again and again.

The thing I object to is the fact that he’s being touted as some sort of recovery hero for all the drama in his story (that he didn’t experience) — A drunk college kid who pulls it together is “good job, buster, now go get a job and a wife.” A hoodlum that people would have run from turned into a respectable citizen? Well, it’s “now that you’re sober and I’m not afraid you’re gonna steal my car, you’re a genius!”

Disaster vs. Redemption is good storytelling. Mr. Frey has written a book that is mainstream successful and that’s awesome. Good for him.

But as someone who’s also lived through alcoholism (albiet from the other side of the fence), I believe that the disease is horrible enough to give each person who suffers a legitimate story to tell with minimal embellishment. Memoir doesn’t have to be “Hollywood sensational” to be good — and memoir isn’t making up addictions and jail terms and arrests that didn’t happen.

Opera just gave her thumbs up still to the book on Larry King.

*whatever*

looks like Random House is refunding money to those readers who feel they have been duped.

too bad we use this thing called The Public Library.

If you want to get ahead in this world, lie. That’s the new formula for success. Ask this lying author, or Jayson Blair, or Judith Miller. Ask George Bush. Ask Norm Coleman. Ask Matt Entenza. To these frauds, the ends justify the means. If you have to lie to get there, so what?

If Frey had the writing talent of David Foster Wallace, his book wouldn’t have gotten rejected by so many publishers and he could have stuck with his “fiction” label. Because after reading all the evidence, it’s absolutely fiction. It may be BASED on his life, but c’mon. The main reason we all loved it (admit it! You couldn’t put it down!) was because we couldn’t believe anyone could go through all that and not only survive but emerge with his badass attitude and iron will intact. Oprah offered him up as a hero and most of us bought it. I find it sort of embarrassing. But hell, if the book helps someone, I guess that’s good. And I was glad to read the Strib article and find out that if I’m ever wasted and covered in vomit with a hole in my cheek and my teeth knocked out, the airline probably won’t just plop me down in my seat and tell me to have a nice flight.

I have yet to read the book but others around me can’t stop turning the pages.

However the regurgitated line of ‘memoir’ as a genre last night on Larry King was utterly…boring.

I prefer Hunter S.