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

A Clutch of Bogus Memoirs

I'm writing a piece about truth and the memoir and if you haven't already been bored to death by the Oprah/Frey story, you might like to read the original expose piece, A Million Little Lies, on the Smoking Gun website.

(If you decide that this whole issue is being taken way too seriously, please do go read the very funny spoof by Kenneth J. Harvey on the Times website!)

Anyway - I decided to see if I could find other memoirs which have pulled the wool over the eyes of readers (and publishers) and found, surprise surprise, that Frey is certainly not the first nor the worst offender.

First there's the case of Nasdijj. Purportedly of Navajo descent, Nasdijj wrote an ode to his adopted son who died of fetal alchohol syndrome. The piece, published in Esquire magazine was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and won him a contract for a full-length memoir. He went on to write two more volumes of memoir about his lifetime of suffering.

Except that Nasdijj was no more Native American than my left elbow, and his stories were largely lifted from accounts by other writers. The LA Times blew the whistle and outed Nasdijj as Tim Barrus a white-writer of gay erotica.

Then there's Binjamin Wilkomirski. His prize-winning memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, was hailed as a classic and earned him comparisons to Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Anne Frank.

Except that he never was the holocaust survivor he claimed to be.

Author Daniel Ganzfried researched the case and discovered that legal documents and school records contradict the author's claims. Wilkomirski was outed in an article in Swiss publication, Weltwoche in 1998, and revealed to be a Swiss protestant called Bruno Grosjean. Unlike Barrus though, he appeared to be genuinely convinced of the truth of his story.

Another memoir fraud was unmasked in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald with the aid of Jordanian journalist and woman's rights activist Rana Husseini .

In her memoir Forbidden Love, Norma Khouri told the "true" story of the murder of a young Jordanian woman by her father because she dared to date a Christian man . The book was a great hit and sold more than 250,000 globally. In Australia, where the author has been granted asylum, it was voted one of the country's 100 favorite books of all time.

Her story was exposed as a fraud and as the Lebanese Times reports:

The scandal was a setback for advocates of women's rights in Jordan and provided a disturbing case study of how lies and distortions can masquerade as "fact" in Western discussions of the Arab world and Islam.

and the book was withdrawn from sale.

Publishers beware!

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.

Soap Oprah

Fiction needs all the big mouth friends it can get, so pleased I am indeed that Oprah Winfrey is going to feature works by contemporary writers again. Now, I'm no fan of her often melodramatic and always glurgy talk show, but she's put some pretty strong titles in the limelight in the past, including works by Toni Morrison, Wally Lamb and Anita Shreve. And her endorsement means that these works are also thrust before the Malaysian reading public. We all like to be told what's good to read - no shame in that.

My own particular debt of gratitude to Oprah is that without her book club, I probably never would have heard of one of my favourite books - Bernhard Schlink's The Reader.

Oprah stopped featuring contemporary titles after a spat with Jonathan Franzen (author of The Corrections, a novel I very much enjoyed) in 2002.

She then decided that dead authors were a safer bet, since they couldn't talk back. But the classic titles she chose did not generate the same enthusiasm, and readers lobbied for contemporary fiction to be put back on the menu. She's now featuring A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.

Do check out Oprah's website for some interesting discussion of some very good reads.