Reader’s Response to the James Frey Article

James Frey has had to endure a lot of backlash from people finding out that A Million Little Pieces was not factually based. Ranging from exaggerating blood alcohol content levels to claiming to be a victim of an accident he cannot prove he was ever at, Frey’s work is probably more fictional than true. To make things worse for himself, he lied to Oprah, telling the woman who rocketed his book to the top of the bestseller list that the stories were true even though it seems they were not. The Smoking Gun quotes Oprah talking about her tears for the author and his harrowing life events. Does it matter that this was mostly a lie?

Not at all. If a work has the power to make you tear-up or understand a truth about the world, maybe the lies were necessary. Many controversial books claim truth, for another annotation I read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a work of fiction that promises all the facts are true, but the story is fictionalized. The opposite of the case here, but they are both best-sellers and seem to be able to move people. I can understand the frustration of being ‘had’, but the question is why did you sit down to read the book. Was it to understand the gross details of another’s life? Most likely not- the book was probably read for entertainment or for enlightenment, to see the world through another’s eyes.

Now on the book marketing side this is a disaster for Frey, and it is his fault. He lied to millions of people, a poor choice that rarely ends well. Nevertheless, he gave them a book they loved, and the readers wanted to love the author. Not reading the book, but only the Smoking Gun article, it seems an author who would spend his life on a drug/alcohol induced rage through life would be the type of person who would lie to his readers. Ironically, Frey’s lie seems to be an action I would expect his character to preform. The readers are upset that he did not live the life he said he did, but are not impressed with his lie. I find this somewhat interesting.

I’m not standing up for Frey, I believe he made a bad moral choice. I also think the readers of his work are also taking the controversy out of proportion. I can’t quite understand why they feel so betrayed. It is fairly common in Memoir to stretch the truth. Did Frey take it too far? Probably, but he also became a famous writer out of the bargain.  Would the readers have loved the novel the same if it was a work of fiction? Why do we trust authors with ‘true stories’ in the first place? If a person at a bar told us an outlandish story verbally we’d probably enjoy it and call bullshit. I don’t see the difference here. P.T. Barnum also stretched ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ with his exhibits, telling customers they were paying to see some rare creature couldn’t exist. Most of the time it was trick of the light, people still loved Barnum’s shows and his controversy fueled his fame. If Frey politician lying about a budget, I would have a much different feeling, but people who tell stories for a living shouldn’t be fully trusted.