The Mantle Of Truth

A Letter to James Frey (after the style of McSweeneys).

Dear James Frey,

O ye truth slayer! O man who exaggerates! O man who battles with drug and alcohol addiction! How dare you challenge the world’s belief in truth! How dare you, gasp, “lie” for the sake of narrative indulgence! How dare you, gulp, use the benefits of writing a memoir to write a great book! Shame on you.

Yawn.

I’ll bet you’re thinking twice about the good fortune of finding yourself in a position to reap the benefits of the Oprah Book Club right about now. And I’m guessing Oprah’s pretty unhappy she stopped sticking to dead authors.

But after seeing your humiliating visit on Oprah, James, I’d have to say that it must really suck to be you right about now. However, the bajillions of dollars you’ve made in royalties and will continue to make off of your hotly contested memoir A Million Little Pieces should go a long way to keeping you warm at night. But honestly dude, the whole thing is just so ridiculous. It’s a great book. You should be proud of writing it. You should be proud of your voice. That’s what matters.

So what if you changed a couple of things here and a couple of things there. In the end, it’s embarrassing to me that so much of the world has started to slay you like you’re personally responsible for the death of truth in popular culture.

Now let me state that these are people who hold up Paris Hilton as an icon and who honestly believe that Nicole Richie doesn’t have an eating disorder.

The whole thing was ridiculous, Oprah was ridiculous. It’s a memoir. In truth, it’s more creative nonfiction than it is anything else. Of course you wrote what you thought would be a better story, but in the end that’s never going to matter because not a single person on that stage defended you.

Not a single person stood up and said, “What’s wrong with all of you. He didn’t set out to lie to you. He wrote a book that had a powerful and lasting affect on people.”

Not a single person stood up and said, “How can a person possibly remember every string of dialogue they’ve spoken in their entire lives. Memory is by definition a difficult thing. Memory by its nature calls for recreations and adaptation.”

Oh Oprah, so glad that you can be so high and mighty, talking down from your mountain about the death of truth in the world. Who did you vote for? What fictions have you created in your own life just to get through it? Here’s one: you call your dogs, your children. The last time I looked there was a slight biological difference between dogs and kids. Aren’t you lying to yourself just a little bit or adapting the truth because that’s how you feel or how you want something to be perceived?

But heh, ho, it’s okay, it’s okay for everyone to hang the mantle of truth upon you, poor James Frey, because you wrote the book, and some web site decided to debunk the fundamental facts. It’s not journalism. It’s not an autobiography. It’s a memoir. An account of what happened. The form by its nature reeks of incorrect facts, misinterpreted events and opinions that are more point of view than by the book. I am honestly surprised that Oprah, refusing to see both sides of the story, didn’t bring a single person to that taping who might have seen it your way.

And if anyone in this world believes that truth isn’t something that’s mutable, well then I’d suggest you acquaint yourself with a little known philosophy called post-modernism. Look it up in a dictionary, if you must.

You know James, my friend Kate made an extremely smart point in an email she sent to me today. She said that what’s the big deal when there’s an entire war being fought, billions of dollars being spent, and lives being lost in the war in Iraq, which is for all intents and purposes, based on a pack of lies. Anyone see George W. up there in the audience calling out for the truth?

Honestly, I think you should have told everyone to shut the hell up. Especially the blow-hard journalists who claim to search for truth when the black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, nature of our society stood up, had a martini and left about a hundred years ago laughing because it’s never been true in the first place.

I’m furious with Oprah. I’m furious with a lot of people and stand by the fact that your voice is authentic, which means a hell of a lot more to me than whether or not you spent three hours or three months in jail.

Hold your head up James. And hold on.