Memoirists have to embellish a little, says sean thomas, but James Frey went way too far
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Thirty-six-year-old James Frey is a very successful writer. His stark, searing, I-did-drugs-and-survived rehab confessional, A Million Little Pieces, has sold three million copies in America, many of them since Oprah Winfrey made it her book of the month, late last year.
Except, it isn't - it isn't a confessional. Following revelations on thesmokinggun.com, it turns out that Frey embroidered large chunks of his blood-flecked memoir, including chapters where a girlfriend dies in a railway crash, and he undergoes terrifying root-canal dentistry without anaesthetic.
But the most controversial aspect of the book is a crucial scene halfway through the text, where Frey says he got busted for attacking some billyclub-wielding cops while off his face on crack, and then - as a result - got slung in jail for three months.
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| There was no fracas. No beating. No billyclubs. Frey was arrested for drink-driving, and swiftly released |
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As we now know, all of this was seriously juiced up. In reality, there was no fracas. No beating. No billyclubs. Frey was merely arrested for drink-driving, and he was swiftly released from a police cell. All in all, he spent about two hours behind bars. Two hours. Not three months.
To make matters worse, Frey's follow-up memoir - My Friend Leonard - purports to begin where the last left off, with Frey doing time in the county jail. The very first passages of the book describe how Frey was nearly beaten to a pulp, by a tray-wielding maniac, while in choky; it then details his life as it was during that hellish 87th day in prison.
Perhaps the author meant to say his "87th minute in jail". And perhaps he meant to say not "beaten to a pulp" but "immediately let out of the police cell after my mom bailed me for $700".
A few days ago all it came to a head when Frey appeared on Oprah for the second time, to be publicly defrocked. Over an hour of live and riveting television, a tearful Oprah Winfrey laid into him, accusing him of 
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