Word: frey
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...James Frey, on the night of Oct. 24, 1992, pull up outside a bar in Granville, Ohio, in a white Mercury? Was he both drunk and high on crack at the time? Did he jump the curb, bump a cop with said Mercury and then get dragged out of the car screaming by the police, who proceeded to beat...
...stories Frey tells in his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, are currently in dispute, but that last tale isn't. To date A Million Little Pieces has sold about 3.5 million copies, helped not a little by the fact that Oprah Winfrey chose it as her book club's third nonfiction title. She proclaimed Frey the Man Who Kept Oprah Awake at Night. The only book that sold better than A Million Little Pieces last year was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Frey's 2005 sequel, My Friend Leonard, didn't do too badly either...
...however, the Smoking Gun (www thesmokinggun.com) a website specializing in digging up public records, posted a lengthy report that challenges some of the facts in Frey's book. Among other things, the website's staff found a lack of evidence that Frey had a relationship with a girl who died in a train accident when he was in high school--Frey even wrote that he was blamed for the accident, which did much to stoke his dark-star mojo. The Smoking Gun found Frey's claim that he engaged in a melee with police officers in 1992 to have been...
...Frey's second line of defense is a little more formidable. As he put it on Larry King, "the emotional truth is there." In other words, whatever the nitty-gritty bookkeepers turn up, his story has an empathic force, a psychological power, that makes the actual factual status of his writing kind of moot, and renders trivial the question of where it should be shelved in the bookstore...
...that defense simply invites the question, if it's not factual, why didn't Frey publish A Million Little Pieces as fiction? By claiming that his story was literally true, Frey endowed it with a heightened immediacy and an emotional force that it lacked as a novel-in effect, he borrowed a little extra emotional oomph from his trusting readers, who treated his narrative as 100% lived experience, real dues paid by a real person. That's not trivial. If Frey wasn't entitled to that immediacy and that force-if he stole that oomph rather than borrowed it-well...