I’m starting to wonder if the only reason the NYT keeps running James Frey stories is so Edward Wyatt can indulge some kind of latent Boy Detective Fantasy (or resurrect a journalistic instinct that is too often surpressed on the publishing beat.) Which may explain why he’s tracking down some of Frey’s rehab-mates, including one Alan Green, a Louisiana state judge who’s recast in A MILLION LITTLE PIECES as Miles, a federal judge.
Green claims that overall, Frey “gave a pretty accurate description,” although “there may have been some differences in how I would have described things.” But then again, considering Green — the brother-in-law of embattled Louisiana Democratic Senator William Jefferson — was convicted last July of taking bribes from a bail bond company in exchange for setting affordable bonds for criminal defendants, can his word really be taken as gospel, let alone be offered up as a credible witness by Doubleday to back up the accuracy of descriptions in the book?
UPDATE: An anonymous tipster writes points out that Wyatt did not “track down” the rehab people. Instead, “Doubleday called and offered to hook the Times up with them. So they were offered up by the publisher, and they STILL didn’t really confirm his story.” It makes Wyatt’s near-obsession even more amusing…
Then again, Jerry Stahl, in a piece for the LA Weekly, thinks everyone should just stop whining and embrace the “post-truth memoir” or “extreme-non-fiction” where the prose is as real as wrestling…
Meanwhile, Emily Carter, the daughter of noted essayist and novelist Anne Roiphe (and a novelist in her own right) has her own take on Frey’s embellishments based on her own stint at Hazelden, which boils down to the fact that they are pretty much on diametric poles:
Most of all I didn’t recognize the insipid yet rigid authority that Frey depicted. Hazelden was not only incredibly posh for a rehab, it was also completely voluntary. Any time you wanted to you could leave. In a very few cases such a departure might mean going to jail, but not, I imagine, in Frey’s case. What I did recognize in Frey’s Hazelden account was Frey. Not Frey himself, but what might be called his m.o.
Bullshit-calling notwithstanding, Carter concedes that “Mr. Frey is guilty of nothing more than being both obnoxious and successful, for which he is not exactly going to go to hell. As for the people who marketed him, they’re on their own.”