With the publication of the creepily in-depth investigative journalism of The Smoking Gun, whose mug shot gallery remains one of the all-time greats in terms of internet pages, James Frey must be shaking in his sober boots about now.
And as I jump onto the blogosphere bandwagon for just a moment, keep in mind that I have read and enjoyed A Million Little Pieces. On the whole, I found the whole premise of The Smoking Gun’s article to be slightly surreal, but I guess when you reach the kind of Oprahfied success of Frey, you’re sort of inviting the detractors, especially if you written the best-selling nonfiction book of, like, all time, the Bible excluded of course.
But what I don’t understand is why people care so much, and I’m finding so many parallels with what’s going on right now in Canadian politics, where smear campaigns, name calling and corrupt finger-pointing seems to take away from the real issue at hand. Did Frey write a great book? Yes, he did. Did Frey take liberties with some of the events for the sake of the narrative? I’m sure he did. What does that man in terms of it being classified ‘nonfiction’? Well, not much considering there’s license with the classification anyway.
So what if he embellished here and there? So what if he made some of the events more intense than they were — it doesn’t make the book any less powerful to know that the author may have changed a few of the details. It’s an accepted fact that it’s hard to write a memoir. That it’s almost impossible to remember exactly what happened to an extent that your life will still make for good reading. In the end, Frey seems to be on the end of a long line of people wanting to attack him simply because of his success.
A Million Little Pieces is a really good book. It’s got a great message and its author seems genuine in his quest to be a better person, to live a good life, so what if memoir is more fiction than non, does it make it any less persuasive or any less of a read? I don’t think that it does.
Funny how Frey’s own advice will come back to haunt him. I’m guessing that the simple idea of “Holding on” might be coming in handy right about now.