Picking Up the Million Little Pieces

If you bought James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces under the impression that it was a true story, you may be entitled to your money back!

You would need to be able to prove that you bought it before Jan 26 when Frey and Random house admitted that parts of the book had been fabricated. Though how you'd make your claim in Malaysia, I really don't know.

Prediction: publishers are going to have to do a whole lot more fact-checking to weed out the fakes, if they don't want to face litigation.

Related Post:

Oprah Chops Frey into a Million Little Pieces (Fries Him in Hot Oil) 28/9/06

Fabricated Memoirs: Even More Fakery

Post-Frey, newspapers take stock of past memoir fakery. Here are some more examples of "non-fiction" works which were were subsequently outed as fakes, with some googled up links for your reading pleasure.

From the Washington Post :

I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala , a 1984 memoir by a Nobel Prize-winner, is found to recount incidents that she could not have witnessed.

J.T. LeRoy, supposedly a male teenage hustler and the author of Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things , is revealed as the fictional creation of Laura Albert and her husband, Geoffrey Knoop.

And theBookseller :

Jihad by Tom Carew. In which the author recounted his exploits with the SAS and his time training Afghan rebels. While Carew served in the army, he was providing support to--not actually in--the SAS (although he was SAS trained).

The Cage by Thomas Abraham. Having fought in the Vietnam War, Abraham told how the Viet Cong held him as a PoW. His claims of capture and subsequent escape were disputed by fellow veterans and remained unsubstantiated by military records.

Widower's House by John Bayley. An account of life after the death of his wife Iris Murdoch included the portrayal of two women who chased after him. He later admitted that they were actually composite characters, 'both real and unreal.'

So even a respected literary type like John Bayley (ex-Warton Professor of English at Oxford) mixes a little fiction into his fact!

I had forgotten about an earlier, very famous fakery case. As a teenager I loved this book and the TV series that sprang from it almost enough to forgive Hayley totally:

Roots by Alex Haley. A chronicle of seven generations of Haley's family was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Many of his genealogical claims were shown to be falsified, and he reached an out of court settlement for plagiarism with Harold Courlander, author of The African.

Related Posts:

A Clutch of Bogus Memoirs (6/2/06)
Oprah Chops Frey into a Million little Pieces (28/1/06)

Oprah Chops Frey into a Million Little Pieces (Fries Him in Hot Oil)

Poor old Oprah - she doesn't seems to have much luck with the living authors she features on her show, does she?

Reverberations continue to be felt after her most recent pick, James Frey, admitted that he had embellished parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces. According to the Guardian, Frey:

.. made a second appearance on her show yesterday, and listened in silence as the occasionally tearful host accused him of "embarrassing and disappointing" her. In his memoir, Frey claimed to have spent three months in jail. When allegations first emerged that he had exaggerated his criminal record, Winfrey made a surprise call to Larry King's CNN show in support of him, in which she called the alleged fabrications "much ado about nothing". But yesterday, to the delight of her viewers, she made a sharp about-turn, telling Frey that she felt "duped", and accusing him of "betray[ing] millions of readers." Frey was met with a barrage of groans, gasps and boos when he confessed that certain facts and characters had been "altered" for inclusion in the memoir. He admitted that he had been jailed for just a few hours, rather than (as he initially claimed) 87 days, and went on to say that he had made mistakes and lied.

The big question is how much does all this really matter? Oprah's public clearly seems to think that it does.

But truth is of course entirely subjective, and all writers who use their lives as material select and shape facts to serve their purpose.

As one reader said in a New York Times forum :

It's about unreliable narrative, baby.