The Trouble With Memoirs

Did 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 him up?

Did he then go to rehab, write a book about it, inspire millions of readers and make a ton of money?

A lot of the 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.

But what exactly did those millions of readers buy? A Million Little Pieces is the gritty, graphic, bombastic story of an Angry Young Man who–despite his well-concealed heart of gold–manages to get himself addicted to drugs and booze. After a string of arrests and a lot of self-destructive behavior, he winds up in a Minnesota rehab clinic, where he befriends a scary-funny gangster (also with a heart of gold) and falls in love with a tragic recovering crack addict (ditto). Redemption ensues.

On Jan. 8, 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 fabricated. What is most disturbing, in a way (since a major plot point hangs thereon), is that the report questions the book’s claim that Frey spent three months in an Ohio jail after rehab. The site even quotes Frey as having said in an interview, “I was in for a significantly shorter period of time than three months.”

What’s going on here? Did Frey lie to boost his story’s drama and his own street cred? TIME was able to check some of the Smoking Gun’s findings, and came to the same conclusion. For example, Marianne Sanders, 62, the mother of the girl who died, says that she and her husband recognize Frey but that he was not a good friend of their daughter’s and that he wasn’t even remotely blamed for the accident that killed her in 1986 (another girl, whom Frey doesn’t mention, also died in the accident). “We knew the name,” Sanders says. “We didn’t know him personally. His name was never mentioned in any connection with the accident at all.” (Sanders isn’t nearly as upset about the book as a lot of other people. “I don’t wish him bad,” she says. “He seems like he’s a good writer. He should’ve been a little more careful, I guess.”)

As for Frey, he isn’t giving an inch–or he gives an inch, but that’s all. He wrote on his own website www.bigjimindustries.com) “Let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bulls___ with any sort of further response.” On Wednesday (having apparently reconsidered that last part), he turned up on Larry King Live with a somewhat more nuanced position. “A memoir is a subjective retelling of events,” he said. “It’s an individual’s perception of what happened in their own life. This is my recollection of my life.” (He compared his book to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird–a misstep, since Kosinski’s book was published as a novel.) Oprah called in to the show to lend Frey her carefully phrased support. “The underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me,” she said. “And I know it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book.”

But even though she was covering Frey’s back, Winfrey didn’t miss the opportunity to protect her own rear, making it clear that she considered publishers, and not herself, responsible for any blowback. “I am disappointed by this controversy,” she said, “because I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work.”

That’s not actually how it works. Publishers pass the buck to authors. Amazingly, it’s rare for a publisher to fact-check the books it sells. Publishers usually just require writers to swear up and down that their books are true and authentic, and leave it at that. “It’s pretty much standard practice, outside of potentially libelous statements, that the author is essentially responsible,” says Larry Kirshbaum, a literary agent and former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group. “To my knowledge there is very rarely any fact-checking. I think it would be almost impossible to fact-check all the titles that are published by a single publisher. It would be onerous.”

As the industry explanation, onerous is not entirely satisfying to readers who believe they are getting a true story. Memoirs have become increasingly lurid in recent years, oozing with child abuse, poverty, drugs, alcohol, violence and insanity, and sex in any number of unsavory flavors; the bar was permanently raised (or lowered) in 1997, when Kathryn Harrison published The Kiss, an account of her four-year affair with her father. Not coincidentally, memoirs have also become one of the best-selling categories in publishing. It’s not hard to imagine the combination of high stakes and a reigning spirit of hotly contested one-downsmanship leading writers to exaggerate.

But leaving aside the basic weirdness of a man’s reputation being damaged by the fact that he didn’t do jail time, there’s also a larger cultural collision in progress here. Right now, according to Nielsen BookScan, nonfiction outsells fiction by about 100 million books a year. “Fiction seems to have lost a lot of authority in the culture,” says Michael Coffey, executive managing editor at Publishers Weekly. “People now look more toward true stories as something that justifies the expense of their time.”

But there’s no corresponding willingness on the part of readers to give up the quirky characters and vivid details and sexy twists and pleasing, rounded endings they’re used to in fiction. To get those effects in nonfiction, writers sometimes cut corners–the factual kind. “If you want to have something that can be sold as based on a true story,” Coffey says, “you’re going to run into guys like James Frey who are embellishing with techniques that are considered a gift in fiction writing but apparently a sin in a memoir.”

No wonder a panel of linguists chose truthiness–a word popularized by faux anchorman Stephen Colbert to mean “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”–as 2005’s word of the year. A Million Little Pieces is packed with truthiness the way Dunkin’ Donuts’ Latte Lite is packed with Splenda.

In defense of his book, Frey invoked the fundamentally subjective nature of the memoir. “It’s an individual’s perception,” he said to King, “my recollection.” And he’s right. Any memoir is unavoidably filtered through the author’s memory and feelings and the inherently impressionistic nature of any literary medium. But before we get lost in an epistemological fog, let’s not forget that there’s a difference between unavoidable distortions and willful deceptions. Some falsehoods come with the territory of the memoirist; others must be deliberately imported into it. That’s a distinction that memoirist Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club and Cherry, is adamant about. “This is not rocket science,” she says. “This is not like sexing a chicken. Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? I think the entire book is horse dookie. This guy has done for memoirs what Jayson Blair [the New York Times reporter who fabricated interviews] did for reporters. What would it have cost him to stick a label of fiction on it?”

Karr isn’t the only memoir writer who’s mad as hell. Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, says she has been losing sleep over it. “What he did is wrong on so many levels, and I’m outraged by it,” she fumes. “He lied. Writing a memoir, especially one like he was supposed to have done–or one like I did–is a very personal thing. You sit down, and you write about your innermost feelings and your experiences, and you share them with your readers. When it succeeds, it’s a very intimate exchange. For him to have just so baldly lied is horrifying and disgusting and disgraceful.”

Walls is eloquent about the emotional cost of being honest on paper. Parts of The Glass Castle describe growing up desperately poor in West Virginia. “In school,” she remembers, “I would go into the girls’ bathroom and fish lunches out of the wastepaper basket. It was very, very embarrassing. It was something I had never told anybody.” And both Walls and Karr vigorously maintain that nobody has been able to dispute the facts of their stories.

As does Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis and this year’s Teacher Man. “I ran into all of this questioning and disbelief,” he says, “and nobody was able to trip me up on any of the facts of my life.” He, too, is reluctant to resort to high-level metaphysics to steer a course between fact and fiction. “It’s like having commentary at a football game. There’s the guy who gives you all of the statistics and tells you what you’re looking at. Then there’s one who provides color. I think the memoir writer is doing both.”

Frey’s second line of defense is a little more formidable. As he put it on Larry King, “the emotional truth is there” in his book. He means that whatever the bookkeepers and muckrakers turn up, his story has a psychological power that makes its factual status more or less moot. Millions of people, some of them addicts, read the book and were deeply moved. Frey’s readings are mob scenes. Are you really going to make a federal case out of where you shelve him in the bookstore?

But that just raises the question, If it’s not factual, why didn’t Frey publish A Million Little Pieces as fiction? By claiming that his story is literally true, Frey endows it with a heightened immediacy and an emotional force that it would have lacked as a novel. In effect, he borrowed a little extra emotional oomph from his trusting readers, who treated his book as lived experience, a receipt for 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 earned it–well, that’s cheating. Frey originally shopped the book to publishers as a work of fiction. How does that not set off anybody’s alarm bells?

But step back a bit from the melee, and you can see a different picture, one that’s easier to sympathize with. Whatever its facts are, A Million Little Pieces has moments of great and indisputable honesty, moments when Frey is willing to show himself looking ridiculous and unpleasant and petty and even cowardly. Here’s one of them: “Lying became part of my life,” he writes about his years as a drug-addicted college student. “I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something.”

Nobody questions that Frey was an alcoholic and a drug addict. And one of the habits addicts pick up is bending and breaking the truth on a regular, routine basis. If you look at the distortions in Frey’s book not as acts of cynical calculation or self-aggrandizement but as symptoms of his disease, they have a pathos to them. If Frey is still lying, if he can’t face his life as he lived it, he’s not whole yet. Redemption is a wonderful thing, but it’s possible that the man whose life became A Million Little Pieces may not have quite put himself back together again.