Second Thoughts

“I'm going to try to write the best book of my generation. And I'm going to try to be the best writer... They're all these guys who have fucking master's degrees and are so 'sophisticated' and 'educated' and ... well, I'm not a guy with a master's degree ... I can write big fat books, but I'm not an effete little guy. "

-James Frey

He has sold 3.5 million copies, so that’s something. A Million Little Pieces is a harrowing, sacrilege and brutal memoir about the extremes of addiction, and, to put it mildly, Frey is a machismo, eyes-on-me, coarse, upfront, affecting, center-of-the-controversy sort of character. And, along with his book being chosen as an Oprah selection, he has garnered a lot of attention.

Unfortunately for Frey, his memoir is made up. It seems obvious at this point, after an extensive investigation by The Smoking Gun, a collector of mug-shots and upholder of muck-raker journalism website, that while there are two or three incidents that bear a slight resemblance to the harrowing accounts in the book, the majority of it is absolutely fabricated. The Times has picked it up, and there’s no turning back.

People are pretty up-in-arms, and rightly so. But I can’t help ask what difference it makes. What is it about thinking that something is “a true story” that changes things? Either Truth or Fiction, memoir or novel, the thing has to work as a story: it has to be arranged into a sequence that makes it told in a familiar way. Nobody’s life occurs in a narrative arc. No matter how closely a writer may try to be true to reality, the human tendency is to see the world in stories. Sometimes we don’t even know it: our very memories are often arranged into a succession that makes sense; we dream in fragments but remember linear happenings. On a most basic level we experience the world via sensory details, but our brain immediately identifies and places them in a framework with which we are already familiar. It’s how we arrange the world.

The Times published a fascinating article on this process, something called mirror neurons, little things that fire in response to chains of actions linked to intentions. In other words, we see visual information of somebody reaching for a glass of water, and these neurons know that, in general, that person will probably bring it to their lips and drink. That’s how the story goes. The sum total of all our mirror neurons mean that we are biologically geared towards narrativizing everything we experience. It is the unconscious step directly after pure sensory perception; we cannot get away from it. Fascinating that this tendency can be traced beyond psychology.

James Frey is an easy guy to hate since his personality is annoying and it looks like the major incident of the book, in which he claimed to get busted for crack and hit a policeman with his car, spending three years in prison, was really just him being a drunk buffoon frat-guy, quietly getting a DUI, and being released on bail 5 hours later. It’s just sort of sad that somebody would make up stories about being more of a “bad boy” than they really were: it’s one thing to brag about accomplishments that aren’t really true, another to claim one was worse than is true. He has since changed it from “bad guy” to “flawed person,” but he maintains that the essential nature of the story, its underlying message of redemption, holds true.

His publisher, for one, doesn’t seem to care. They published this statement recently: "Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence. By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided 'A Million Little Pieces' was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections. Recent accusations against him notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers."

As it turns out, A Million Little Pieces was originally submitted as a novel to many, many publishers, and was rejected 17 times (not that publishers have had a recent reputation for spotting talented writers recently). Then he recast it as a memoir, apparently changed a few things, and off the book went. It became inspiring and heartbreaking, empowering and touching. The inside flap of the book calls it "an uncommonly genuine account."

It’s true: who would want to read a novel about some drug addict wandering around three states puking on himself and getting his teeth ripped out without anesthetics? It might be riveting for awhile, but it would be gratuitous and probably banal and a bad book. Oprah said when she recommended the book that, while reading it, she kept turning to the book jacket and telling herself “Phew! He really does make it through. I know that he turns out all right.” The idea that it’s a real life really means something.

I haven’t read the book, so I can’t say if it’s good. The excerpts I’ve read are well-written in a certain kind of one-off, unscripted, Hemingway-esque sort of style. I don’t know if it would be a good novel all by itself, without the crutch of it being a “true story.” I remember finding out that the opening titles of Fargo, which claim it to be a story based on true events, were false, and I remember being very surprised, but when I think about it, it doesn’t matter. Fargo is masterful film which doesn’t depend on the audience’s perception of its being a true story to be good. James Frey’s memoir, I fear, does depend on that idea. That’s why people are so pissed off.

Is there a moral code to this? Is Frey morally bound to tell the truth, insofar as he can’t help the human biological/psychological tendency to narrativize?

Last spring the writer Pam Houston came to DePauw to give a reading, and she was talking about an essay she had written about looking for wolves or foxes or something, for a nature magazine. In real life, they only saw the animals one time, in the mid-morning, kind of a non-event, and the rest of the way was a disappointment. In the story she wrote, however, they searched all day to no avail, until the last hour of daylight, when, off in the distance, they spotted a wolf in the gloaming. And it watched them, lifting up on its hind legs for a few seconds before running off to disappear.

Some people were troubled by her purposeful recasting of the day’s events in service of making a better narrative: she was supposed to be writing a nonfiction essay. But she simply shrugged, and said “What I wrote is a better story.”

In effect, her point is that it doesn’t really matter what time the wolves came out, and whether or not one stood on its hind legs: the aesthetics of the story are greater than the morality of telling the truth. A moral question is trumped by the possibility of making better art.

In Frey’s case, though, the power of the book’s success depends on its truth. As a novel, it’s not very good, using stock characters and cliché-ridden portraits. For that reason he’s kind of up a creek. The issue here is that it can’t rest on its laurels as a novel. Its power rested on the idea that it was a true story. And some have called him the worst kind of fraud, since the book's message is of rejecting victimhood and the humble philosophy of AA in favor of macho, self-making, heroic escapes from addiction. If his claims to life-threatening addiction and self-destruction are false, they are also misleading and fatal to real addicts trying to recover. In this sense his fraud is grievous: he exploits inspirational, genuine ideas for literary success. And those ideas are the reason we read books in the first place. He has not only fuzzed the line between novel and memoir--he has manipulated the bedrock gift of inspiration that is shared by both. This is at the root of any book, Truth or Fiction.