Well, that rumor isn't true; Random House says they won't refund your money for the book. You should return it to your bookstore and they'll do it.
Still....
If you liked the book, why wouldn't you just keep it?
Did you see James on Larry King? Maybe he just got caught up. Kind of like a freewriting, when you do all one sentence, how the sentence starts carrying you along with it, picking up speed, and you're letting it rip, letting the words pour out and you don't even know where they came from.
Maybe that's what happened.
As he said to Larry, it's only a few pages--something like 20 out of 400-something--that are in question. Should those 20 pages serve to ream the guy? Would anyone want to ream him if his book were failing instead of wildly succeeding? Was he being whiny, talking out of the side of his mouth? Once a lying addict, always a lying addict??
I dunno....
Larry did seem to go pretty soft on the guy. Barbara Walters would have made him cry. (Does she even still do interviews?)
Here's a transcript of the show. Oprah called in. Scan to almost the end of the transcript.
You're all so quiet out there. What do you think?
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I remember seeing the episode of Oprah where Million Little Pieces was the subject. I can remember seeing the woman that went into rehab literally thanking Frey for her life. I thought Frey was quite an extraordinary man, although the idea of no novocaine on a root canal made me raise an eyebrow. No dentist worth his license would allow that, I think. Especially a root canal, where if you jump the wrong way when a nerve is touched, it can be a big problem.
Enough about root canals... *ugh*
When the "scandal" all came out, that the factual innacuracies of the book were being scrutinized, it made me wonder.
One thought that I had was... If he has embellished, how much did he embellish? How much of it was "the fish was THIS big" type of thing, and how much of it was his editor saying "We need to make this bigger and more dangerous to sell the book". How much of it was him, and how much of it was directed in the process from draft to finished product? We don't really know, and no one is really saying.
We are all guilty of it when we recount tales of happenings in our lives. Most of the time I turn it into bits and snippets of a characters life in some fiction I am writing. I don't know if I would do that for a memoir, or a non-fiction piece about my life. The truth is important. The facts are what people buy a memoir or biography for.
But sometimes the facts can be boring, and need some decoration to get the page turning, right?
I think that Frey's book has helped people. I think it has helped to shed light on something very sad and scary in society today, which is drug use and addiction. If it helps people, I for one am glad.
But as a writer, I have a heavy heart as I read the press about the book being innacurate or "fictionalized". Will this taint other memoirs about touchy subjects? Will we look more fervently at people's works where they claim to have been part of these amazing transformations?
I want the truth about what really happened in his story to come out, but I hope that it does not have far reaching effects on other writers. I hope that this does not make people judge other books by their cover, based on one persons deception of a traumatic event in their life.
That said, I have not read the book. I have been tempted to buy it, but I am waiting for it to become available at the library, since I can't afford to spend inordinate amounts of money in a Chapters right now.
I am more curious to read it now, though. *grin*
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