Anatomy of a Fraud

I read A Million Little Pieces almost a year ago. I read it in two days. I loved it. Correction: I love it and I do not care if any of it is untrue.

Every media outlet out there is drooling over the story that James Frey lied about portions of his books, A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard, the sequel to his award winning memoir. The report issued by The Smoking Gun (the website that gets everyone) said, he spent almost no time in jail and was not charged with many of the serious crimes he claims to have committed.

If his book was a prison memoir, yes, I would feel cheated. But this book is about his time in rehab. It is about his struggles to stay sober in a world that for him had become chaotic. Yes, he was a dummy to lie about the details of something so easy to prove but as a writer, I can see how he wanted to give the story a bit more drama, to raise the stakes a bit. Again, it was dumb but it does not take away from the power of his story.

When you read the book, the sections about his time in prison or the crime he commited were particularly murky and clunky. I simply skipped over them and focused on the more captivating sections of the book. The books have large, large sections that are entirely dialogue. He could not have remembered those sections verbatim. He clearly made a lot of that up. These are tactics people use to make books more interesting and it does not bother me one bit.

The bad press that Frey is receiving is punishment enough for any lies he may have told. I'd hate to be him this morning. Imagine how many people are bothering him at his local coffee shop.

I am reading this great book of essays by Megan Daum entitled My Misspent Youth. (Her essay, Variations on Grief is incredible btw!) Her introduction concludes with the following paragraph:

These pieces are not confessions. They're about me but they're also about a lot of other things, and a few of the stories I tell never even happened. I am not a person who keeps a journal. Instead, I'm inclined to catalog my expreriences and turn them over in my head until some kind of theme emerges and I feel I can link the personal banalities to something larger worth telling. This may be the reason I often have difficulty remebering events as they actually happened. No doubt it is a symptom of my aforementioned point, which concerns the tendency of contemporary human beings to live not actual lives but simulations of lives, loving not actual people but the general idea of those people, operating at several degrees of remove from what might be considered authentic ...

The biggest problem with this is that Frey went on Oprah. Yes, he is rich because of it. However, when you are associated with Oprah, there is something almost sanctimonious about it. No one lies to Oprah. No one. Being chosen as an "Oprah Book" is a cult. It's a cult most writers want to join but a cult neverhteless. On Oprah's site, readers can communicate with Frey directly about drugs, rehab, writing, whatever and have in droves. Clearly, the readers who have been brought to this book via Oprah, feel a sort of kinship with Frey now and that comes with our new age of the internet, blogs, and all other means to bring writers closer to their readers. Many readers felt a kinship with Frey and those people are mad, mad, mad.

I assume that readers are feeling similarly cheated by JTLeroy. I have less to say about him mainly because I have only read his articles and none of his books. The New York Times said, "LeRoy, who has claimed to be an HIV-positive former teen street hustler, has been played in public by Savannah Knoop and that LeRoy's three critically acclaimed books might have been written by Laura Albert, who has said she helped discover LeRoy."

The difference with the LeRoy scandal is that LeRoy was always shrouded in mystery. He came to events in sunglasses, lipstick and wigs. You knew that there was something going on with LeRoy. That his public persona was just that, a persona. It's funny now that people are so shocked that he was completely fabricated. It's even funnier that this comes out a few months before the screen adaptation of his book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.

These articles give you the full, full story about LeRoy. As for Frey, he and his notoriously bad temper, will be on Larry King Live tonight at 9pm and I for one will be watching!