A Million Little Pieces of Crap

UNIVERSAL REMOTE

I've been mulling over how to write about the controversy surrounding Oprah last book club selection, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. I'm sure everyone here has heard about how The Smoking Gun discovered Frey fabricated or greatly embellished parts of his drug-addled, criminal past and how Oprah basically gave him a pass by saying it was “much ado about nothing.” Frey defended himself on Larry King by saying “Everyone’s memory is subjective. If in three weeks we were both interviewed about what went on here tonight, we would both probably have very, very different stories.” This defense doesn't even pass the sniff test.

Any analysis or opinion I come up with will never top Michiko Kakutani's blistering rebuke of Frey, Oprah and the Me Generation's belief in the flexibility of truth.

Mr. Frey's embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the "writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story," his casual attitude about how people remember the past - all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in Oprah Winfrey's new selection for her book club, announced yesterday: Night, Elie Wiesel's devastating 1960 account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

If the memoir form once prized authenticity above all else - regarding testimony as an act of paying witness to history - it has been evolving, in the hands of some writers, into something very different. In fact, Mr. Frey's embellishments and fabrications in many ways represent the logical if absurd culmination of several trends that have been percolating away for years. His distortions serve as an illustration of a depressing remark once made by the literary theorist Stanley Fish - that the death of objectivity "relieves me of the obligation to be right"; it "demands only that I be interesting."

And they remind us that self-dramatization (in Mr. Frey's case, making himself out to be a more notorious fellow than he actually was, in order to make his subsequent "redemption" all the more impressive) is just one step removed from the willful self-absorption and shameless self-promotion embraced by the "Me Generation" and its culture of narcissism.

There is special irony in Oprah's having picked Wiesel's Night as her newest bookclub selection. "I make a distinction between what I lived through and what I imagined others to have lived through," Wiesel has said. "My experiences in the book - A to Z - must be true." This is a far different approach than James Frey's, who said alterations were common for memoirs and that he told “the essential truth” in A Million Little Pieces. I can understand, if not condone, why the previously unpublished Frey would lie in order to sell his book. What I don't understand is how Oprah, a woman of such intelligence, influence and power could be so blase about something so important as telling the truth.

UPDATE: My friend LW summed up this whole episode with one word: Truthiness. I wish I'd thought of that.