A Million Little Lies: Week 7 Prompt Response

I remember my sister reading A Million Little Pieces when it first came out.  She raved about it, saying similar things to what Oprah said about it, that it is so real and intense.  She noted how poignant the book was, and she highly recommended it to me.  Then I heard something about how Oprah was calling out James Frey for falsifying his stories.  At the time, I thought it was so ridiculous for someone to make up life experiences and try to pass them off as reality, especially in an age where the Internet can expose all.  Yet, I was still intrigued to read the book anyway—after all, what a brilliant writer Frey must be to draw all of those readers in and make them believe his stories.

I never did get around to reading A Million Little Pieces.  I was, however, very interested in revisiting what happened with this book, so I read the Smoking Gun article about it with the intention of writing my response to it this week.  At first I was stunned at how much TSG uncovered about Frey’s past.  Then I realized that all you need is Google and you can figure out just about anything about anyone.  As I kept reading through the article, I just felt more and more embarrassed for Frey.  Surely he anticipated that it would be fairly easy for people to find him out, even though all of his “acquaintances” in the book were either “dead” or “missing”?  Criminal records and police reports don’t lie.

This lead me to wonder why anyone would go through the trouble of fabricating an entire book about their life, if there’s even the slightest chance that their lies could be exposed.  Such a great writer, like Frey, must be intelligent enough to foresee that possibility.  Why risk that, then?  Obviously Frey knew that his book would be a hit with readers, especially if they thought that it was a true story.  People love reading stories of triumph, or by someone they can tell has overcome the past that they’re writing about.  It’s one thing to write a book about a very flawed, troubled character—but it’s more fascinating to people when that character is a real, living, breathing human being.  TSG even pointed out that Frey’s book was rejected 17 times before it was finally picked up; it was only published then because he presented it as a memoir rather than a piece of fiction.  I can understand why a writer would find it worthwhile to write a fake memoir: it’ll be published, the public will love it, and Oprah will promote it because it’s so fascinating.

There’s such an ethical problem here, though.  I’m sure that, somewhere in the world, at some point in history, there has existed someone who lived a life similar to the one Frey wrote about in A Million Little Pieces.  But that life was never Frey’s.  To claim that it was made him a liar, unreliable in the eyes of his readers.  It doesn’t change the fact that people love the story.  I’ve heard/read that people still have continued to purchase/read the book, even to this day.  However, it does raise the issue of whether or not it’s acceptable to publish lies and market them as the truth.  Would it be more ethical if Frey had published the book as a memoir under a pseudonym?  Would that be less of a lie?  Would people have been less offended and hurt if that book had come out as the true story of John Smith and not of James Frey?  I have to wonder where people—readers, writers, publishers, and critics alike—draw the line in terms of honesty in writing.  Personally, I think I’d be more forgiving if the book had been written under a pseudonym because that’s technically a “fake” name, so it seems there’s no harm done, really.  What thoughts does everyone else have about this?

Resource

The Smoking Gun. (2006). A million little lies: Exposing James Frey's fiction addiction. Retrieved from http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/million-little-lies