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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.

So the new and improved, slightly ‘evolved’ Stephen Harper is the new prime minister. Huh. I was more stupified to learn that a measly 64% of the population actually voted and judging from the results, I’d say there were many opportunities to make a difference that were wasted.

Some of the things I heard on the radio:

1. A woman who said she was too wrapped up in her own “bubble” to vote. Is she kidding? What could be more important to her than the right she has to decide what happens to her own body? On what kind of a country she’s living in? On whether or not health care will continue? No offense honey, but nothing in your life should have been more important than voting. It takes five minutes. You even get time off from work to vote if you need it.

2. One woman wanted the Conservatives to win but voted Liberal in her riding because she thought the Tory (and I loathe to call them that) candidate wouldn’t win. So a lot of thought went into that vote, that’s for sure.

3. People were voting for the Conservatives because they are ‘sick’ of the Liberals. This makes absolutely no sense to me. The same thing happened in Ontario after Bob Rae and the NDP frustrated people; they voted for Mike Harris, who then proceeded to be the worst premier the province had seen in decades, maybe ever. It’s a knee jerk approach with no understanding for the larger issues, the greater good. And now when the crazy sh*t starts happening and things start to change, people will start complaining and wondering what went so very wrong. When unemployment creeps up and our troops are getting killed in Iraq and we carry a deficit for the first time in over a decade, then they’ll all be wondering why they voted for the knucklehead in the first place.

Please vote. It’s the most important election of our adulthood, this one. The ramifications of today’s election will resonate for years to come. I’m not one to tell you who to vote for, please just vote.

So a couple friends of my RRHB came over on Friday night and we played cards. They were all drinking our neighbour’s homemade wine ($20.00 for 25 bottles—oh what a steal!). After the exasperating few days I spent being very ill after the non-wedding, and because of the meds, I abstained.

For the very first time in a long while, I sat and watched the three of them get absolutely hammered. It was pretty enjoyable, especially when they gave me a new name to go along with my new last name, and I shall forever be known to the three of them as Sparkle Poirier. Heh.

I lost every single game we played at Euchre, which is fine because I really just like to play cards, I don’t care if I win or lose. And drunken euchre players are always funny. And then the evening digressed into talking about politics because it’s on everyone’s mind.

Then today we got up and had breakfast with a dear old friend of ours, who we regaled with tales of the drunken debauchery from the night before. He laughed. A good time was had by all.

But here’s the coup de grace of my day—we saw Underworld: Evolution. I’m still processing it. But damn, I love that series. It’s an okay sequel, not as good as the first movie, but certainly a good set-up for the third, which I’m already hoping to see in the next few years.

Now, I’d like to take a survey. Put your hands up if you think small children should really be allowed to see a film where people are shot, decapitated, mortally wounded, viciously killed, de-blooded, and a whole host of other cool vampire and werewolf-like stuff happens? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Shame on you parents who brought their five and six-year-olds to see a film meant for an adult audience. Oh, and Scott Speedman is totally hot. It’s almost a crime.

It’s a very full weekend for a girl with Wegener’s Granulomatosis. And it’s not even over yet!

He’s number 20 out of 20 — but come on — that’s still totally awesome.

So here’s a list of the things I’ve been doing this week. It’s so not exciting:

1. Attending a conference for work. It was three days long and even though you don’t do anything, you literally just sit there hearing about all the fun stuff that’s coming down the pipes, you are brain dead and exhausted at the end of it.

2. Going to school, watching television (hello Jack Bauer), listening to Metro Morning, going to work, eating dinner and sleeping.

3. Oh, and I barfed, again. Also not fun.

4. Reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and loving every single word.

5. Discovering that it’s actually easier on me to walk from Dundas down to King Street vs. trying to navigate the stairs of the subway station. That’s how pathetic I am at the moment from the disease. Talk about a weakened state.

6. Trying not to take too much Gravol but then giving in because it’s better to be sleepy that to be throwing up. Can I get a witness?

7. Missing my friends because I couldn’t really carry on any email conversations while I’m sitting in a conference.

8. Wanting to sleep like Rip Van Winkle because I’m so tired.

9. Waiting for a hug. Really from anyone.

10. Wishing I could stay home all the time and watch Ellen.

And that about sums me up this week? What’s up with y’all?

My RRHB was clearing out one of the rooms he’s going to demolish on the main floor of our house when I got in from brunch. One of the boxes he pulled out was from my old work, after they ‘let me go’ I wasn’t allowed to pack up my office—they just wanted me gone. I couldn’t look at the stuff before now, I guess, because the box has been sitting in our storage room for months.

A lot of it is garbage. A funny poem from McSweeney’s. A picture of the young beat generation writers, Kerouac, Burroughs. A funny newspaper clipping of Johnny Rotten holding a press pass with an awesome look on his face. Essentially, a pile of stuff that I used to personalize my office while I had one.

But in a copy of Girl With A Pearl Earring, I found a $50.00 bill. Now, that’s way above and beyond finding money in your pants or your winter coat. Usually, you’re lucky if you find $5.00 or $10.00. But $50.00? Man, that’s my spending money for the week. See, it paid for me to ignore the residual effects of being forced out of that job—I’m $50.00 richer than I was yesterday.

So, ever since the non-wedding, my stomach has been precious, to say the least. But today it finally went overboard. Not enough sleep combined with some yoghurt for breakfast equals a truly nasty trip to the bathroom where my imaginary friendship with James Frey seems more real than ever. You know when he’s talking about pieces of his stomach coming up, yeah. I’ve been there. It’s not a fun place to be.

Dear Stephen Harper:

With all your tax-cut bullsh*t and your faux ‘evolution’ (I think I just barfed a bit in my mouth, seriously), I have just one question for you. Will you be funding all of us liberal-minded, free-thinking, social-program supporting, non-neo-conservative thinking Canadians who will want to move if you, shudder, are elected to a majority government as the Globe and Mail is reporting?

Thanks,

ragdoll

There’s a great article in today’s Publisher’s Weekly about the whole controversy over James Frey’s memoir. I suppose it’s not shocking that the editorial team moved the book into nonfiction because they hoped it would sell better, anything and everything to get people to read is an honourable thing to do in my mind.

But the people who are crying because not every word is ‘true’, I might have to go all post-modern on their ass and ask them what does truth mean in today’s world? We can’t get a straight story from anyone; news is embellished for ratings; creative nonfiction vilified for turning out a solid narrative; actors are held up on pedestals usually reserved for well, writers, poets, statesmen/women and politicians; and truth becomes so utterly relevant to the person who is speaking it that, again, I don’t see what the big deal is.