I caught the Trade Paperback bestsellers on CNN's crawl yesterday. #1 was Night by Elie Wiesel, Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick. #3 was Collapse by Jared Diamond - a book you'll be hearing more about from me in the near future whenever I finally finish it, which will be sometime after I finish The Idiot. And in the #2 spot was A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. So I guess all this controversy hasn't hurt his book sales much.
Frey certainly isn't the first self-made man, the first person to combine fabrications and exaggerations with a dash of the truth to cook up a self-aggrandizing and largely fictitious autobiography. In the years following his death Richard Feynman was accused in the letters pages of Physics Today of exaggerating his role in many events, both major and minor, in his book of autobiographical anecdotes Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Game-show creator and host Chuck Barris took the art of the fictional autobiography to new heights with his "unauthorized" 1982 autobiography Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (made into a motion picture twenty years later.) Fictionalized memoirs are nothing new. And biographies, especially posthumous biographies, are notorious for weaving together documented facts and occasional speculation to create colorful but not necessarily accurate portraits of their subjects.
So will Frey's book hang in on the bestseller lists? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, you'd be better served by reading Jared Diamond's book. Now.
Seriously.
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Daryl Sznyter
5 years ago
1 comment:
I agree that fictionalized memoirs are nothing new. But Frey crossed a line, both in fact and in spirit. I don't mind when people maybe add a little drama, or add a little peril, or exaggerate. Or otherwise do things that remain true to the spirit of what they accomplish.
It's one thing to make a composite character of people you met in prison (or even take events from several prison stints) and use that to tell a simplified tale ... that doesn't bother me at all.
I appreciate it as a reader; the key is to remain true to the general experience, e.g., "I was in jail, and here's what it was like." Frey's small changes don't bother me at all. That his girlfriend slit her wrists instead of hanging herself ... okay, it's sad either way, assuming it's true.
But Frey completely made up being in prison, and completely made up characters he met there, and thus he wasn't being true to the essence of what happened to him. That's fiction, not memoir, and thus total bullshit. He should be put in stocks in the publishing district in New York for two weeks next to a box of rotten tomatoes.
FWIW.
Bill
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