It hardly seems necessary at this point, given that Oprah went on national television to validate James Frey’s commitment to truthiness over historicism, but Anchor’s going to put an author’s note on A Million Little Pieces. Yeah, that’ll fix everything. Let’s face it, Meghan O’Rourke is right in her Slate wrap-up: This is “a Salem witch hunt where no one is burned at the stake.” We all enjoyed getting a chance to speak our mind on how true memoirs should be, but this isn’t going to change the practices of the publishing industry one bit. The people who feel a commitment to historical accuracy are going to keep hewing to the truth, and the people who believe it’s good enough for a story to feel right are going to keep buying manuscripts by writers who spin “subjective renderings” of their pasts. Maybe some unlucky memoirist with a pub date in the next four weeks, like Franz “Honeymoon with My Brother” Wisner, will have to deal with more aggressive questioning than usual, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Unfortunately, as Seth Mnookin explains in Slate (as noted by our sister blog), Frey “has helped to shape people’s notions about drug abuse” with the lurid downward spiral charted in his book and presented as straightforward fact. “By claiming that his story was literally true,” Lev Grossman adds in Time, “Frey endowed it with a heightened immediacy and an emotional force that it lacked as a novel”—which, you’ll recall, led to its rejection by more than a dozen publishers who were told it was fiction. One of the few genuinely touching moments during Frey’s ass-saving appearance on Larry King came from a viewer who called in to ask, “As a recovering addict, I wonder how inspired should I be now after using your book as a tool towards recovery?”
Frey used the opportunity to defend himself yet again (“the essential truth of the book, which is about drug and alcohol addiction, is there”), but what should have been emphasized was that, no matter where someone in recovery finds his or her tools, success comes from believing in your own ability to recover. The woman who called, or any recovering addict who decided to stop drinking or doing drugs after reading Frey’s book, may face self-doubt because of this week’s revelations, but they should find cause for rejoicing in their decision to change their lives for the better. That A Million Little Pieces was the impetus for a number of those decisions might make the book meaningful on some level, but it doesn’t make it any truer than The Days of Wine and Roses or a novel to which it probably owes a larger debt, Trainspotting. And as Mnookin thoughtfully points out, it doesn’t make life any easier for the addicts leading quiet lives of desperation that don’t even remotely involve cop-fighting and face wounds. Just as, as we’ll see in another post, JT LeRoy has made life a lot tougher for real transgendered people with her squalid fantasies of a grim sexual underworld…