James Frey, of Oprah fame; A Million Little Pieces

[Pure]

A tale originally submitted as fiction is rejected, then as non-fiction, with promotion including Oprah, becomes a huge best seller.


http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html

 

[Stella_Omega]

That's it- Im never telling the truth again!
What a creep.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

did he think no one was ever going to try to corroborate his story?

I wonder if Oprah will come out and denounce him now?

 

[dreampilot79]

did he think no one was ever going to try to corroborate his story?

I wonder if Oprah will come out and denounce him now?

does it matter? he's already cashed the check.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I wonder at what point Oprah became a literary critic of such standing?

 

[dysphemist]

I wonder at what point Oprah became a literary critic of such standing?

I don't think Oprah is a respected literary critic, but she has an enormous following that believe everything she says about clothes, food, books, etc... When she talks about a book, millions flock to the bookstore simply because "Oprah said so". On one hand, it's good that she promotes reading but it's too bad that she has so much influence on what people read.

 

[Samandiriel]

Frey is to appear on Larry King live tonight.

 

[Guest]

Frey is to appear on Larry King live tonight.

Think he'll show?

 

[Guest]

Sheesh! I hope Oprah is more embarrassed about this situation than she was about the fuss she made over the Hermes store not letting her in after hours. In the next post I'm going to paste Janet Maslin's original (and brilliantly satirical) review of the book from 2003.

As for Oprah, it says everything to me that she'd pick this drivel to promote. She's put forth a liar as a role model of hope for millions of people in psychic pain (and helped him earn mucho big bucks from same). Yep, I'm angry.

Perdita
------------------------------------
Gawd, I love good satire:

NY Times, January 11, 2006, Op-Ed Contributor - A Million Little Corrections By TIM CARVELL

IT is with great sorrow, and no small amount of embarrassment, that I must confess to some inadvertent errors, omissions and elisions in my best-selling memoir, "A Brief History of Tim." In the wake of the recent revelations about the work of J T Leroy and James Frey, it seems inevitable that some of my small mistakes will come to light, and so I feel duty-bound to be upfront and honest with you. Plus, I hear that reporters have been sniffing around.

I feel that none of the slight liberties I took in writing my memoir really affect the overall work, but nonetheless, you should know a few things:

I am not, in fact, black.

Nor am I, to the best of my knowledge, a woman. Anything in my book that suggests otherwise is the result of a typographical error. That this error was compounded by my decision to pose for my author photo and bookstore appearances in drag and blackface is, I will acknowledge, unfortunate.

The portions of my book dealing with Depression-era Ireland are, I have been reliably informed, copied verbatim from Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." I can only conclude that I accidentally confused my manuscript with my notes for my memoir in which I copied large portions of other writers' works, just to see how they were structured. In hindsight, the fact that I was born 40 years after the Depression should have been a tip-off.

My parents are both alive; any reference to my being orphaned at age 12 was meant to be strictly metaphorical.

Furthermore, my parents and their lawyers would like it known that neither they, nor any other member of my family, ever beat and/or had sex with me. I thought it was clear that those parts of the book were meant as a joke. (That's what the emoticons were for.)

In writing a narrative, it is sometimes necessary to compress or combine certain incidents for dramatic effect. I did much the same thing in the chapter of my book dealing with my prison term, although in reverse: in the interest of dramatic clarity, I expanded my 1993 arrest for jaywalking into a seven-year stint in Sing Sing for manslaughter.

Okay, it wasn't so much a jaywalking "arrest" as a ticket.

Fine, it was a stern warning. Happy now?

The death of my older brother, my ensuing severe depression and subsequent emotional breakthrough with the help of a caring psychotherapist did not happen to me, but rather to Timothy Hutton in the film "Ordinary People," which I saw at a very impressionable age, and which I could have sworn happened to me.

Ditto for the part about accidentally hacking into Norad and being saved from causing a global thermonuclear war, with an assist from Dabney Coleman. That was "WarGames."

Really, the fact that I could remember his name only as "Dabney Coleman" should have given me pause.

And, finally, since people are getting all "fact-checky" on me, I should just confess that my life did not, in fact, shatter into a million little pieces. I just went back and recounted. It was six pieces. Consider it a rounding error.

Tim Carvell is a writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

 

[Guest]

NY Times, April 21, 2003

Cry and You Cry Alone? Not if You Write About It By JANET MASLIN

James Frey is an Addict.
He used to drink a lot and smoke Crack. Starting when he was Ten years old.
Now he is ready to tell his Story.
He went to Rehab at a famous Hospital in Minnesota. His Parents sent him there when he was 23 even though he couldn't stand them. Back then he was a Mess. The police were after him in three States.
Now he is 33.
Now he is a Writer.
He writes all about Despair and Pain and then Recovery and then Redemption.
Maybe you have heard this story Before. Maybe it sounds like Movies. He ingested Substances for a long time and was very soused. But somehow he ingested those Movies too.

"James Frey is a new voice in fiction," extols an admirer of his first book, "A Million Little Pieces," as part of the readers' feedback found on Amazon.com. Mr. Frey is reported to have originally presented this material as a novel when he looked for a publisher. Pat Conroy has called this "the `War and Peace' of addiction."

Little problem: This story is supposed to be all true. It is supposed to be a scorchingly honest account of how its author sunk to unimaginable depths, railed against the Twelve Step program that was supposed to help him and ultimately found his own form of salvation. His account does have grit and myopic immediacy that could make it a campus classic, what with such attention-getting incidents as the time this self-loathing author pulls off his own toenails. But in charting the course of his experience, he follows a memoirist's Twelve Step pattern that is as familiar as what Rehab offers.

Step 1: Hit bottom. As "A Million Little Pieces" begins, its author has knocked out four front teeth and is in horrible shape. How much does he drink? "As much as I can." He exemplifies the phrase "his own worst enemy," unless you count William Burroughs.

Step 2: Wallow. "I claw at my skin, tear at my hair, start biting myself," he writes. "I don't have any teeth and I'm biting myself and there are shadows and bright lights and flashes and screams and bugs bugs bugs." For candor's sake, and to enlighten sadistic voyeurs everywhere, "A Million Little Pieces" also describes exactly what it is like to experience root-canal dental work without painkillers.

Step 3: Suffer Remorse. "Everything that I know and that I am and everything that I've done begins flashing in front of my eyes," he writes. And no wonder. On a typical day in this book's early phase: "I follow my usual routine. Crawl to the Bathroom. Vomit. Lie on the floor. Vomit. Lie on the floor."

Step 4: Scorn Help. In Mr. Frey's case that means contempt for the Alcoholics Anonymous precepts and cynicism about the stories told at A.A. meetings. "If it involves the number Twelve, it's not gonna happen," he tells his supervisors in Rehab, who want him to use crayons on a First Step coloring book (he chooses black among 64 colors) and write his self-improvement goals on a bulletin board. "I'm Going to Be a Laker Girl," he writes. Authorities express doubt as to whether his treatment is really working.

Step 5: Meet a Girl. And go all soggy whenever she appears. Another patient is the beautiful Lilly, who smiles warmly, if predictably, whenever she sees James. She is there to comfort him when it is time for the next phase.

Step 6: Cry. "The Gates are open and thirteen years of addiction, violence, Hell and their accompaniments are manifesting themselves in dense tears and heavy sobs and a shortness of breath and a profound sense of loss," he writes. "It's wet and Lilly cradles me like a broken Child."

Step 7: Find a Mentor. "Life is hard, kid, you gotta be harder," James is told by a mob boss named Leonard, one of the book's larger-than-life figures. Leonard, a fellow patient, also alerts James to the wisdom of the Tao te Ching, asks to treat James as his son and stages a big party once things start to go well on the ward. The mobster orders lobster for this celebration.

Step 8: Hug Mom. After much bitterness, and after confessing the kinds of things he used to do while the baby sitter thought he was sleeping, James reaches a rapprochement with his previously hated parents.

Step 9: Recognize Your Strengths. James undergoes routine psychological testing. The verdict: Maybe he was depressed, frustrated, violent, self-destructive and predisposed to addiction. But: "You are also very intelligent," he is told.

Step 10: Face a Crisis. In this case it of course involves Lilly. And although every detail of it may be accurate, it powerfully and sadly resembles pulp fiction.

Step 11: Rise Like a Phoenix. Put the past behind you and learn to be happy. Remember, as this book indicates in a postscript, that there are worse things than enduring Rehab as a 23-year-old with well-heeled parents. Many of its secondary characters wind up dead.

Step 12: Publish. Attract a lot of attention.

You know the rest.

 

[Pure]

Frey on Larry King

Frey stressed the book was a "memoir" and "my story," but agreed with King that contents of a memoir should be true.

He suggested people (e.g at 'The Smoking Gun') were being unduly picky, esp. for a memoir, and that only 18 pp (of over 400) contained events that were disputed. He said that he had several times mentioned to the publisher and others that there were embellishments and changes of name and detail. He gave an example of an 'innocent' change, where a cut beneath his lower lip was described as being on his cheek. King asked why make that alteration. Answer, "It is easier to speak of a 'cheek.'"

Frey defended the 'essential truth' of the book, and its being about addiction and overcoming it.

Oprah phoned and generally supported him (no recriminations) though not very assertively. She did not get into details but mentioned that it was essentially a personal account of redemption and that many had found inspiration in the book. They followed the advice NOT to give up on life.

-----

An accompanying news story on Frey's book looked at the hypothesized actual event behind the book's account of Frey hitting a cop with his car (going up on the sidewalk), getting into a melee, and doing 3 mos. time. The cop's version: yes, the car went up on the curb, and Frey was arrested for DUI. He was very cooperative. After going to the station, he made bail of 750 dollars and was released. No records exist of any time served.

---
Overall, the complaints of The Smoking Gun folks were never rebutted, and one must assume that the 'Gun' reconstructions of events--generally LESS dramatic and criminal--were accurate.

In particular, the Gun charged that Frey made up a personal link to a teenager who was tragically killed at a railway crossing, since she was in the car driven by a drunken friend. Frey claimed he knew her and was to have been with her that night. Hence he blames himself, etc. Her parents don't think she knew him.

 

[Pure]

Fantastic Review of Frey's Book

A Million Pieces Of Shit
By John Dolan ( dolan@exile.ru )


"A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey. Doubleday 2003, $22.95

This is the worst thing I've ever read.

A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. 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.

Frey sums up his entire life in one sentence from p. 351 of this 382-page memoir: "I took money from my parents and I spent it on drugs." Given the simplicity and familiarity of the story, you might wonder what Frey does in the other 381 pages. The story itself is simple: he goes through rehab at an expensive private clinic, with his parents footing the bill. That's it. 400 pages of hanging around a rehab clinic.

It feels longer. It feels like years.

For all Frey's childish impersonation of the laconic Hemingway style, this is one of the most heavily padded pieces of prose I've seen since I stopped reading first-year student essays. Frey manages to puff up this simple story to book length thanks to one simple gimmick: he repeats. Repeats the beginnings of sentences. Repeats the beginnings of phrases. And the endings. Endings of phrases. Phrases and sentences.

And while his prose is repeating, his tale is descending. Descending into Bathos. Bathos in which he wallows. Wallows. In bathos. Bathos, bathos, bathos.

The results can be quite funny, altogether unintentionally, as when Frey tries to dramatize the travails of love:

"I start crying again.

Softly crying.

I think of Lilly and I cry.

It's all I can do.

Cry."

I found myself laughing every time I read this, imagining Daffy Duck doing the scene: "It'th all I can do!" then turning to the audience to clarify things: "Cry, that ith."

Of all Frey's repetitions, the most common is the conjunction "and." It's "and" after "and" after "and." He seems to think he's broken the transition problem right open. Every time he needs to connect two thoughts or actions, he simply plops an "and" between them.

This can work, when it's done by somebody with talent -- Frank O'Hara, for example. O'Hara's poem "the Day Lady Died" uses a breathless, self-centered narrative full of "and"s to contrast with the sudden stop when he learns of the death of Billie Holliday.

The trouble is that there's no end, no variation and no irony whatsoever in Frey's awed, non-stop list of his every move, as in this gripping account of going to the dentist: "I go back to the medical unit and I find a Nurse and I tell her I have to go to the Dentist and she checks the outside appointment book and it checks and she sends me to a waiting room and I wait."

I found myself becoming morbidly fascinated by the number of conjunctions Frey could pile into a single sentence. The one I just quoted has six "and"s. Not bad, but hardly a record. A few pages earlier, Frey offers a sparkling account of getting a bowl of oatmeal which is sustained by seven "and"s; "...I see that I'm late and I see People look up and stare at me and I ignore them and I get a bowl of gray mushy oatmeal and I dump a large pile of sugar on it and I find a place at an empty table and I sit down."

Frey has another stylistic tic almost as distracting as his conjunctions: he capitalizes some but not all nouns, making his would-be laconic, macho narrative look as if it had been dictated to Emily Dickinson on a day she'd been sipping laudanum. Lulled by the dull story, you drift into consideration of the pattern, if any, behind these capitalized nouns.

But the caps make no sense, study them as you will. They can be downright confusing, as in "I snuck into my neighbor Ira's Garage...", where the capital "G" turns a house into a car-repair business.

Caps are also used to sanctify some of the therapy-babble Frey learns at the clinic. Jonesing hard, he dreams of mounds of drugs. This, a therapist solemnly informs him, is "...a User Dream," caps and all. Indeed. When you fall asleep hungry, you might have an Eater Dream. If you lust in your sleep, you may experience one of those Fucker Dreams.

These capitals feed nicely into the insanely self-aggrandizing tale. Frey's every whim is capitalized and cherished. When he feels calm, a rehab therapist informs him, "You had what is called a Moment of Clarity."

Walking on a trail outside the clinic, Frey names and capitalizes everything: "Trail," "Tree," "Animals." Then he sees a lower-case "bird." I was offended for our feathered friend. Why don't the birds get their caps like everybody else?

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a "fat otter": "There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me."

Now, can anyone tell me what a "fat otter with a flat, armored tail" actually is? That's right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the "large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch" would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the "fat otter" is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:

"Hey, Fat Otter.

He stares at me.

You want what I got?

He stares at me.

I'll give you everything.

Stares at me...."

And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should've slapped him with its "flat, armored tail" and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its "Pile with monstrous protrusions."

But if you hit Frey, you would be in serious trouble. Not just because Frey's dad is a filthy-rich international corporate lawyer, but because, as he never tires of informing the reader, Mister James Frey is one tough bastard. He gets in real fights, albeit only with moribund addicts twice his age.

Frey makes his bones on the mean corridors of his clinic by going through painful reconstructive dentistry without anaesthetic. Because he's an addict, he can't even have local anaesthetic (or so he claims). He goes through about 30 pages of what he calls, in his inimitable style, "Pain pain pain pain pain" in the dentist's chair. He then totters back to his room unaided. After that, he is the baddest dude in the whole private clinic. He wins the respect of the very baddest of his fellow inmates, who become his best friends.

Guess who his new friends are. Go ahead, guess! I'll give you a hint: just pick the most ludicrous cliches in American TV aimed at pubescent male audiences. Forget about subtlety. Imagine this novel was a screenplay by the dumb brother in Adaptation. Who would he pick for the hero's friends?

Well, here are the guys who became Frey's pals: Leonard, a highly-placed Mafia killer from Vegas; Matty, a black former world champion boxer; Miles, a black Federal judge from New Orleans who plays the clarinet.

There they are, the most childish dreams of every little rich white boy: being down with the brothers and the Mafia. The tough guys. The Jazzmen. Having friends with connections in those two equally artificial cities, Vegas and New Orleans.

Frey makes other friends who are also straight out of Central Casting -- like Ed, a Steelworker from Detroit. Ed, like all these other walking cliches, turns out to have a soft, sentimental heart under his tough exterior: "Ed is a hard man. Big, strong, tough as the material he works with, and I have never seen him be vulnerable in any sense of the word, but as he talks of his sons, his eyes get soft and wet."

A steelworker who's "tough as the material he works with"? I thought that sort of cliche died with Vachel Lindsay. But then Frey's a very old-fashioned writer, who combines the homoerotic machismo of Hemingway with the sentimentality and syntax of Saroyan and Sandburg -- a nasty mix, a soiled, archaic rich-boy populism.

Never one to be shy, Frey squeezes every drop of bathos out of his new pals. Leonard, the Mafia guy, reveals that his whole career was based on his loyalty to Mike, a Mafia boss with a heart of gold (suuuuuuure!) who raised the orphaned Leonard, taught him the business and then was shot down while Leonard watched. Mike's death scene is another cliche: "Leonard's voice cracks and tears start running down his cheeks. 'I held [Mike] as he bled. Just held him and told him how much I loved him. He was still conscious and he could still talk, but he knew he was done. Right before he went, he lifted a bloody hand and he put it right on my cheek. He looked me in the eye and he said, live honorably and with dignity, respect the memories of all your parents...' And then he died, right in my arms, shot down like a fucking dog. He died in my arms.'

Leonard breaks down and starts weeping."

At the end of the novel, Leonard becomes Frey's fairy Godfather, announcing:

"...I would like you [Frey] to be my Son. I will watch out for you as I would if you were my real Son, and I will offer you advice and help guide you through your life...."

Frey's tale of being adopted by a Mafia figure epitomizes the greed for notoriety, as decor, which drives this novel and its whole genre. Frey already has two trusting, devoted, wealthy parents. It's their money and devotion that get him to the clinic in the first place. But when they come to visit him in the clinic, he's furious. He can't stand being around them. Frey claims to be puzzled at the intensity of his anger at his real parents, but it's really very easy to understand. Mom and Dad have already given him what he requires of them: money, security, and the confidence to go slumming and then, when the time is right, to cash in on his Manhattan connections to become famous.

By visiting him in the middle of his street-cred winning campaign, Frey's parents threaten to ruin the whole con. Rehab, for trust-fund druggies like Frey, is a place to be born again, as the son of cool Mafia Dons and the trusted friend of serious black guys. Having Mom show up and hug you right in front of them is worse than Mom dropping you off at the Prom.

Luckily, Daddy has to take off for Brazil, and Frey can return to bizarrely detailed descriptions of every single hug and tearful farewell between him and his new pals.

And I mean detailed. It takes Leonard and his new son three pages just to get out to the limo. And there, of course, there must be another maudlin goodbye, stretched to absurd length. Anyone else would've said, "We hugged and said goodbye," but Frey takes you through every step of the process, padding his bathos as if explaining "hug" to a Martian: "Leonard steps forward. He puts his arms around me and he hugs me. I put my arms around him and I hug him. He lets go and he steps away and he looks in my eyes and he speaks."

And even after the blow-by-blow account of the big hug, it's not over, because of course there must be another macho-yet-tearful farewell: "[Leonard]: 'Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity....'

I look back. In his eyes.

'I'll miss you, Leonard.'

'We'll see each other soon, my Son.'

I nod. I force myself not to cry."

Frey and his tough-guy friends spend more time weeping and hugging than the runners-up in a Miss America competition. Frey's aggressively male stance has something archaic, even campy about it. Frey has placed the entire book in a gender-segregated institution, recalling Hemingway's title Men without Women. (Male patients are not allowed to say anything more than "Hello" to female patients in Frey's rehab center.) And like most homoerotic novelists of the 1930s, his true period, Frey resorts to violence to prove he's no homosexual, confessing (that is to say, boasting) that he beat a French priest to death for daring to place his hand on Frey's utterly masculine thigh.

It's odd that a novel in which a gay-bashing murder is treated so casually should be so esteemed in the US. I thought y'all had decided that it was no longer OK to beat gay men to death for casual come-ons. But then the US is moving back in time so quickly that perhaps I'm thinking of a moment now far in the future.

Frey ticks off the entire Hemingway shopping-list, including boxing and impotence (which Frey blames, of course, on the drugs, the drugs, the terrible drugs). He goes on at great length about the importance of watching a title fight, which makes him and his fellow rehab patients feel like "men."

Women are minor characters in the book, and the least-convincing passages of all are those in which Frey attempts to hint at a grand love affair in the past or tries to contrive a love interest with an addicted former prostitute, Lilly. Here's the hymn to love with which he ends a chapter:

"I miss Lilly.

I miss Lilly.

I miss Lilly."

My reading of this passage is that he missed Lilly. But then I'm a trained literary critic. Other readers may have other, equally valid interpretations.

Frey misses Lilly so much, so often, that you begin to suspect she didn't exist, and was added to the text to neutralize the lifelong homosexual panic in which this belated Norman Mailer finds himself. It's a pity Frey never studied Stevens. If he had, he'd have known that the more times one repeats an assertion, the less convincing it becomes.

With Lilly and the gay-bashing story in place to reassure the reader that Frey is a man's man, Frey feels free to devote the last third of the book to protracted and lachrymose farewells. Frey, who's now the toughest and most beloved guy in the whole rehab clinic, says goodbye to all his streety friends with many a sniffle and hug.

The sheer, crude, maudlin bathos of the farewells first amused and then began to frighten me. Here, for example, is Frey's moment of bonding with his black New Orleans clarinet-playing Judge roommate:"I am a Criminal and he is a Judge and I am white and he is black, but at this moment none of that matters."

Oh, but that's nothing. He's got a million sob-scenes more self-indulgent and false than that one. How about this example of closely-observed detail: "[Lilly] smiles. With her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her shaking hand." I just wish I could figure out how she managed to make her shaking hand smile. That would be worth watching.

As his utterly unconvincing romance with Lilly progresses, Frey dives deeper and deeper into cliche: "I am in love with a Girl, a beautiful and profoundly troubled Girl who is alone in the World...."

The man was born too late; he should have been writing subtitles for silent-film melodrama.

Sticking closely to silent-film formula, Frey (and I think caps are warranted here) Rescues the Girl. Now he is ready to go out and face the world.

All that's left is, oh, 120 pages or so of tearful farewells. He says goodbye to his dorm warden:

"He reaches and I reach and our hands meet. We hold strong and firm we stare in each other's eyes and there is a bond of respect."

Then it's on to the clarinet-paying roommate:

"He reaches out his hand and I take it and we shake hands. We release each other's hands and we hug each other. We hold each other for a moment and Miles says good luck, James and I say you too, Miles."

And before we can even wipe the tears from our eyes, Frey is parting from his counselor and her tough yet sensitive Fisherman boyfriend: "I step forward and I hug her. There is emotion in the hug, and there is respect and a form of love. Emotion that comes from honesty, respect that comes from challenge, and the form of love that exists between people whose minds have touched, whose souls have touched. Our minds touched. Our hearts touched. Our souls touched."

If you can find a worse paragraph than that in any published book, I'd like to see it. At least it disposes of one more character. Alas, Frey must still hug the Counsellor's boyfriend, who says -- I swear to God, this is a direct quote: "I ain't much for words, kid."

But like every other laconic character in this book, the Fisherman has more dialogue, borrowed from a Spencer Tracy film: "Make us proud, Kid." I hate to quibble, but nobody has talked like that since 1933. If they ever did.

Never mind, never mind; it's time to take the bags out to the car and meet Frey's brother, who's come to take him home. Guess what they do first! Yeah: they hug: "He hugs me. I hug him." It's these sudden twists that make Frey's story such a page-turner.

And so, like a child returning to his nice warm bed, Frey returns to the privileged world which has supported him all through his life. His rehab friends, of course, cannot. After all, they're authentic, and their authenticity means they have to die violent drug-related deaths in order to validate the streety credentials this rich brat has won in the clinic. They must die so he can strut.

So at the end of the novel, Frey supplies a list of what allegedly happened to his friends from rehab. As you'd expect, most are dead, imprisoned, or vanished. But after all, they were only local color, proud scars that will give Mister Frey some lively stories to tell at the summer place in Maine.

And this self-aggrandizing, simple-minded, poorly observed, repetitious, maudlin drivel passes for avant-garde literature in America?

My homeland is in worse shape than I thought.

 

[Guest]

 

[rgraham666]

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. - P.T. Barnum.

 

[Pure]

after reading the review, my theory of 'oprah' is that she likes sobstories with lots of (apparent) grit, but ending in redemption. (rehab memoirs, being one prime example)

it also seems that bad writing does not 'sink' an alleged piece of
non fiction, the way it does, fiction.

ADDED: Cartoon in today's paper:

Man in front of a librarian at her info desk asks, "Do you have A Million Little Pieces?"

She replies, "Yes, some are in the nonfiction section, some are in fiction."

 

[3113]

Permanent Midnight

A Million Pieces Of Shit

Thank you SO much for posting that Pure! It was a great morning laugh--and it will certainly keep me from even glancing at the book out of curiosity.

Once again, The Emperor has no clothes...and it's worst than everyone seeing he's naked, but being unwilling to say...I think the America public really believes a naked man has clothes on. And anyone who says he doesn't gets beaten up for being a liar and ruining the moment.

If I may toss out a book recommendation of my own--one of my top ten nonfiction books, and a truely brilliant, IMHO, drug memoir, then:

Permanent Midnight by Jerry Stahl.

Now there is a book for writers. Oprah would not approve, however. First, Jerry's incredibly funny and mocks a lot of folk, including television folk and himself. Second, there's almost no sentimentality--no hugs, kisses or tenderness. Instead, there's a lot of raw and raunchy sex, and more than a little creepiness. Third, rehab is barely there--it's an addict's tale, not a rehab tale. No sob story and then redemption here....redemption has to be crawled after. And, finally, so far as I know, it's Nonfiction and fact-checked--a true story.

But the writing is amazing, and the most amazing thing is that Stahl arranges his true live in a way to give it a dramatic structure--no need to change the facts in order to do that, merely decide on how to present the timeline. That's what a real writer knows to do.

It got the attention it deserved when it came out, too bad it's now been eclipsed by bad fiction.

 

[Pure]

News Update--WOW! ---anyone see it????

Oprah, having defended Frey a couple weeks back, had him on her show, yesterday. Anyone see it??

In the few moments I saw, she confronted him over his lies, e.g, about the dental work, about the manner of Lilly's death, about his time in jail--yes, he says, it was 2 hrs and not 87 days! He was extremely uncomfortable, stuttering, and not appearing frank, about what was true and what wasn't.

As one interviewed expert says, "Maybe this will turn him back to drugs."
He pointed out that part of drug treatment was learning to tell the truth about oneself and condition. Frey is still learning.

 

[EmeraldKitten]

This whole situation has pissed me off, lol.
I wanted the book back when it came out. It sounded interesting.
Ironically, I only just bought it right before Christmas.
I'm probably not even half way through it, but I'm enjoying it.

I would never go out and buy a book because Oprah said so.
I wanted it because my father is a drug addict.
As I read, I take it as a learning experience. I'm taking it as informational, and it's interesting.

So? The guy wrote a book and embellished and lied. Whoopty shit, lol.

After all, he's a recovering druggie, and that's what they do. They lie.
I never once picked up that book and thought every word would be the truth.

*Sarcasm* Poor poor Oprah.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

I don't think Oprah is a respected literary critic, but she has an enormous following that believe everything she says about clothes, food, books, etc... When she talks about a book, millions flock to the bookstore simply because "Oprah said so". On one hand, it's good that she promotes reading but it's too bad that she has so much influence on what people read.

It sounds like a cult to me.