The Frey Fray: Truth or Fiction -- Does it Matter?

On January 8, TheSmokingGun.com published an extensive expose asserting that James Frey's top-selling A Million Little Pieces is filled with "fabrications, falsehoods [and] other fakery."

James Frey

Thus began a media firestorm, with publications from the New York Times to The Onion weighing in on the memoir that turned out to be fiction. Frey's January 14 appearance on CNN's Larry King Live included a phone call from Oprah, who indicated her continued support for Pieces, dubbed "The Book That Kept Oprah Awake at Night," on her October 2005 show announcing it as an Oprah's Book Club selection.

But what of this New York Times besteller that's sold more than three million copies and was a May/June 2003 Book Sense 76 Pick? If Frey's book has inspired millions of readers, does it matter if the facts are real? Is the publisher at fault here, too? And just what is a memoir, anyway? Bookselling This Week asked several booksellers for their take on the controversy.

Robert Utter, owner of The Other Tiger in Westerly, Rhode Island, said, "As a former newspaper owner and journalist, I've been steeped in the culture of trying to get the facts right. I follow the line Gay Talese is following, that 'nonfiction' means that [a book] is true."

Therefore, the book will be moved to a different section of Utter's store: "As far as we're concerned, it's a piece of fiction... I don't agree at all with Frey's assertion that a memoir has room in it. When you write a memoir, if you use a quote, if it happened 20 years ago, no one expects you to recall precisely what happened. But I think readers expect you to remember essentially what was said, not to fabricate events -- especially to inflict yourself into someone else's life and call it your experience. I think that's going much too far. I'm not sure how much nobility there is in this book anymore."

Russ Harvey's review of A Million Little Pieces was featured in the May/June 2003 Book Sense 76. Harvey, a bookseller at the Cody's Books Fourth Street location in Berkeley, California, stands by his initial positive review.

He told BTW, "It's a memoir, so I don't expect it to be a biography or autobiography, with annotations and references.... I do see a difference between a literary memoir and an autobiography. Factual accountability tends to be looser when someone is telling me the story of his or her life."

Harvey said Cody's will continue to shelve the book as a literary memoir. He added that, when he first read the book, he did suspect that Frey was no stranger to embellishment: "From the first page [on which Frey wrote that he awoke to find himself seated on a plane 'covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit, and blood'], I couldn't imagine any airline would let on someone in that condition. I took it as the story of his emotional past, and thought he might not let details get in the way."

Rosemary Thomas, owner of Fresh Words bookstore in Highland, Illinois, said Pieces will stay put in its current spot in her store, too. "All the copies we have in stock are in a New York Times bestseller display. Unless Random House re-categorizes it, we will keep it where it was [before], and will be open and honest with customers about the hullabaloo."

Thomas said she's glad Oprah has voiced her support for Frey. "From a professional angle, I'm glad she's standing by her selection to keep her audience from being outraged. If she was outraged, I'd have a riot.... And I'm glad to see she's standing by it so she doesn't lose credibility.... We do know she can move some books."

As for the notion of publisher responsibility, Thomas said, "This is something that needs to be addressed by publishers. Even though memoir is open to interpretation about how true it needs to be, Frey had to have had an editor who was proofreading and checking things that are public record. If it turned out not to be true, a sentence could've been inserted to indicate imagination run amok."

Harvey concurred, noting, "A little disclaimer would've gone a long way toward diffusing this, without altering readers' view of it when it was originally published. It's a future lesson for editors and publishers."

Betsy Burton, owner of The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah, and author of the memoir The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller, published in 2005, thinks it's the author's responsibility to be truthful about the verity of his or her work.

She said, "I feel pretty secure in saying memoir should be based absolutely on fact. If you want to write a novel, you should do so and tell people that's what you've written. It's true that everyone who writes a memoir does shape the truth unwittingly -- you filter it through your own perceptions and, more to the point, misperceptions. But an attempt at honesty is at the heart of what a memoir is about -- you weed through your own perceptions and get at the truth."

After all, Burton said, "It really isn't right not to tell the truth -- I just don't agree with people who say it's okay. I don't think I'm a prude or a moralist ... if the truth isn't important, what is?"

That's what Brian Sweet, owner of Trails End Bookstore in Winthrop, Washington, wants to know. He told BTW, "This is very disappointing because I loved the book. It was on our Top Picks of the Year list in our newsletter, but I had to change [the list] because Pieces was a fake."

He added, "What troubles me is, if the verifiable facts are proven to be made up, what about the non-verifiable ones? I don't believe it anymore, I think he just made it up...and the sequel, My Friend Leonard. I loved that, too!"

Sweet said he's removed Pieces from his store's Staff Picks shelf, and no longer recommends it to customers. If people do ask for the book, he said, "I'll tell them it's a great read, it's not all true, and leave it at that."

The farther-reaching effects of the Frey fray also concern Sweet: "I think it's bad for bookselling. When people walk into a store, it feels like even though we're selling stuff, it's not about that -- it's about community and literature and thoughts, and people like being here. If customers feel like they're being scammed, that's more like going to the mall or the movies, or watching crap on TV. Independent bookstores are supposed to be a notch above, the way I think about it. Now they're just all suckers for reading it and thinking it was real." He added, "It's not like he's not remembering things right, he never even went to jail! It's obscene, and I don't think people realize how obscene it is."

The will to believe might be a casualty of Frey's untruths, too, Sweet said. "There's another memoir out, The Glass Castle, that's wonderful. It reminds me of Frey's - I read it in another two-day sitting. And it made me wonder if it was made up."

Those looking for a Frey alternative might enjoy The Glass Castle - and Burton has a couple of recommendations, too: "I loved the memoir The Piano Girl - it's a lark to read. And I'm reading The Strong West Wind, a memoir by Gail Caldwell. In the first sentence, she asks, 'How do we determine who we are?' We can answer that question only with truth." --Linda M. Castellitto