The Bestselling Fake True Story

By Sheerly Avni, Truthdig. Posted January 13, 2006.

On Tuesday, the investigative website The Smoking Gun published the six-page report, "A Million Little Lies," exposing a number of fictional events in James Frey's supposedly nonfiction memoir A Million Little Pieces.

TSG reported that the confessional, an Oprah Book Club selection and a memoir of Frey's struggle with drug and alcohol abuse and eventual recovery, was riddled with exaggerations, embellishments and outright lies, including claims that he'd beat up a cop and spent three months in jail, as well as an extremely suspect incident involving a fatal car accident.

The scandal was certainly enough to undermine the credibility of the memoir, the man and, worse, Oprah's taste in books. It also made Frey famous. Not just writer famous, but star famous. JT LeRoy hasn't quite capitalized on his 15 minutes -- perhaps because his is a more narrow audience, perhaps because it's hard to do television appearances when you don't exist -- but Frey, already flourishing under Oprah's halo, now managed to do the near impossible: The scandal over his untrue true story bumped both Lindsay Lohan and Brangelina out of the headlines.

Usually it takes weeks or months for beleaguered celebrities to orchestrate their public coming-out, but these are accelerated times, and James Frey broke his media silence two days ago, choosing a celebrity interviewer known for his unrelenting questioning style, ruthless integrity and dogged determination to get the truth at all costs: Larry King. King grilled the famous fabricator with questions such as "Are you surprised at the furor?" and "What are your feelings about 'The Smoking Gun?'" and "Are you a bad guy?"

To be fair to King, Frey has been well coached, and he seems to have learned his interview strategies from George Bush: Repeat a few choice phrases over and over again, do not answer any questions directly, evade, and do it all with a charmless affect and slippery evasions of responsibility at every turn. Above all, stay on message. Which is exactly what Frey did. Frey's "defense" seemed to involve matching one of three answers to every question posed: "I stand by my book and my life" and "changed facts to protect people's identities" and "This is a book about drug and alcohol abuse, nobody has once denied that I was an addict."

His big defense is that since the disputed sections make up only a small percentage of the book's page count, the matter is being blown out of proportion. This is a blank refusal to face the idea that telling the whole truth is exactly what credibility is all about. In addition to being specious and illogical, the Frey non-conversation with King wasn't getting anywhere, even after Frey's mother came on screen to defend her baby.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based writer.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »