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We might have guessed that if "Queen of Found-Memories" Oprah was excited, something must have been very wrong about Mega-Fraud James Frey.
Frey’s unmasking and then total strip-searching in public by TSG has got "Found-Memories Oprah" making all sorts of excuses for the hoaxer on the Larry King Show.
Since the book's 2003 publication (the $14.95 paperback was issued last summer by Anchor Books), Frey has defended "A Million Little Pieces" against critic claims that parts of the book rang untrue. In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin mocked the author--a former alcoholic who has rejected the precepts of Alcoholics Anonymous--for instead hewing to a cynical "memoirist's Twelve Step program."
According to a blog named Swallowing the Camel in a post called A Million Little Pieces of Crap Frey eschewed AA and the 12 Steps because, as an atheist, he refused to relinquish his life to a Higher Power.
You can imagine the low-life audience this hustler was trying to achieve when you read a "memoir" of a drunk who ridicules Alcoholics Anonymous. AA advises submission to a Higher Power. AA has long been the enemy of those who seek to absolve perps and pervs and bongers and drunks of all or any accountability/responsibility for their own social pathologies.
Oprah & Hollyweird & her buddy Frey appear to believe the Highest Power is in reality their own fantastically bloated hedonistic egomania.And of course, that story:
"the time in Paris (he's supposedly fled to Europe after jumping bail in Ohio) when, on his way to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine, Frey stops into a church to have a good cry. There, a "Priest," while pretending to listen to Frey's description of his wrecked life, makes a lunge for Frey's crotch. "You must not resist God's will, my Son," says the priest. A vicious beatdown ensues, with Frey possibly killing the grasping cleric, whom the author kicked in the balls 15 times. Mon dieu!"
Yes, you can be sure Frey thought that little vignette would win over those holdouts who weren’t satisfied with bashing AA. Wonder why he didn’t make up a synagogue and rabbi fable? Or a mosque and mullah make-believe? Or transvestite near-murder? I'll bet Frey's French was up to the blurted confession. Or maybe the "priest" understood Middle-West obscenities like Frey?
Simpleton blubberers like Oprah are an easy mark. But leftist trashing of any red-state icons like AA or respected institutions like the Catholic Church has become a mantra-staple of the MSM. Frey knew how to get trash-mongers like the Talese group interested.
In their classic deconstruction of Oprah and her entire fantasia fan-club funny farm, entitled THE MAN WHO CONNED OPRAH, TSG says:
we chose to focus on the crime and justice aspect of "A Million Little Pieces." Which wasn't much of a decision since almost every character in Frey's book that could address the remaining topics has either committed suicide, been murdered, died of AIDS, been sentenced to life in prison, gone missing, landed in an institution for the criminally insane, or fell off a fishing boat never to be seen again.
How convenient for pulp-fiction hack-shops like the Talese Family.
The Smoking Gun proceeds to completely destroy any credibility that poseur Frey may have claimed. But the gullible Oprah stands [or weeps] firm: The Toronto Globe and Mail, a liberal megaphone, uncharacteristically snipes at the liberal MSM, but then at the very end, BLAMES IT ALL ON BUSH! [spoiler alert!]
What's more intriguing is why sleepy ol' Booktown has reacted so violently. Just let's say that not a whole lot of work got done this week in literary America.
The reason is that the Frey fray has unmasked so many of the book biz's shameless practices.
The first of these is the quixotic power of Oprah to create bestsellers. Ms. Winfrey went gushy over the Frey book last fall, referring to its author as "The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night" and hailing the tome as "like nothing you've ever read before."
Now, the Empress is revealed as not wearing a full set of clothes, woo-hoo, woo-hoo. On-line discussions are still raging as to whether she let her audience down by touting a book whose veracity she didn't bother to examine.
Then came the next cry: Where were the publisher's fact-checkers? I have news for you: Publishers generally don't check facts. Hell, they barely edit. I'd be willing to wager this newspaper is edited five times more carefully than almost any book you've read in five years. Publishers claim they can't afford it.
Hence the second weakness exposed by the Frey fracas: The publishing industry's conveniently loosey-goosey attitude toward separating "facts" from "fiction" in highly profitable "memoirs."
But this book was published by "New Journalism" huckster Nan Talese:
Even Nan Talese, the top-rank editor who published the Frey book, was quoted in The New York Times defending Mr. Frey's inventions as a memoirist's right. "Memoir," she said, "is personal recollection. It is not absolute fact."
Her husband, the famous New Journalist Gay Talese, came out in the same story saying the opposite. "Non-fiction takes no liberty with the facts, and it should not," he said. "All writers should be held accountable."
Yes, the New Journalism by sex-addicted Gay is more than about self-absorbed New Journalists. But Quis custodiet custodes? Or who are the custodians? It turns out that facts are very low on New Journalism’s priority list. Nor, by extension, the venerable publishing industry that munches on the MSM BS and calls it Hershey Chocolate.
The Globe and Mail goes on:
Gay's right. It's not quantum physics, after all. If you made it up, it's fiction. I'm not talking about changing names, or subjectively remembering a conversation that took place long ago, all of which seems defensible in a memoir. But inventing a three-month jail term? That's a spitball.
But what about real literary lions and really great memoir as literature?
Defending it as "memoir" gives honest non-fiction -- Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life or Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, to name two -- a bad name.
Would it be acceptable to alter facts in a memoir about, say, the Holocaust? Of course not. Recovery memoirs evidently have lower standards.
Which is yet another publishing industry secret Mr. Frey's case has uncovered -- the degraded but profitable state of the addiction and recovery genre.
Emotionally clich?d, intellectually vapid and stylistically excruciating, the vast majority of these books rely on boilerplate format: Start with the darkest, most hackneyed account of one's downfall; invent a lily-white and utterly infantalized vision of goodness and redemption at the other end of the scale; and proceed swiftly from one to the other, simplifying all emotion along the way.
Just the kind of stuff Lionel Trilling wannabee Oprah touts along with Faulkner and Tolstoy!
John Dolan, co-editor of The eXile, a Moscow-based English-language alternative webzine (http://www.exile.ru), put it best last week, having long-doubted Mr. Frey's bona fides: "Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It's a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: The rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers."
The Hurricanes, Tsunamis, Global Warming, New Journalism, ALL BUSH'S FAULT!
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