Oh, we'll get around to James Frey's Larry King Live appearance last night, don't worry, but first let's recap some of the surrounding hoopla: Early in the day, Edward Wyatt was reporting Doubleday's ya-pays-yer-money-ya-takes-yer-chances attitude towards the controversy over whether A Million Little Pieces was All True, Pretty All True, or Total Bullshit: "We decided [it] was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections. Recent accusations against him notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers." Just a few hours later, however, there were reports that Random House was offering refunds...but only to those readers who'd bought the book directly from the publisher. Random was quick to declare, however, that this was not a special circumstance, but something they'd do for any book purchased in a similar manner. (As to how many of the 1.7 million copies of AMLP sold last year were purchased in this fashion, I'd be surprised if it even approached 1 percent. I am, however, no expert and you should consider this estimate as made up as James Frey's criminal past.)

Well then, what to make of Frey's hour in the hot seat with Larry King? The Syntax of Things blog has a blow-by-blow recap, so I'll just highlight some of the key issues, like his insistence that the book's a "subjective retelling" and "an individual's perceptions of what happens in his own life." Plus his continual insistence that only a handful of pages in the book were under dispute; it was typical of King that it took him 42 minutes to get around to asking whether the problems with those passages might call the rest of the book's veracity into question. At which point, Frey falls back yet again on the "essential truth" of his story. In other words, the parts he made up (or maybe he's just remembering them wrong on account of all the drugs, a new explanation that King basically spoonfed him) aren't important because he's still a junkie alcoholic who's stayed sober through sheer willpower. A position Oprah Winfrey explicitly endorsed when she called 59 minutes into the show (causing it to spill over into Anderson Cooper's time slot) to say she stood by "the man he is today" and admired the way he used the book "to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves."

John Scalzi rejects that theory: "Bullshit. If one purports to write a non-fiction account of an event, one is, by definition, enjoined from writing fiction. If you write fiction and claim it is non-fiction, you are a lying liar who lies. Writing something that 'feels' true does not make it true, and the fact that people will come forward to defend 'truthiness' over truthfulness in non-fiction makes me want to go on a rampage with a shovel."

(Gotta admit, though, I loved the part where Frey was invoking Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird—a book which was always marketed as a novel—in his defense, and Larry blithely responded, "And Jerzy killed himself." For a fraction of a second, I almost thought Larry had gotten fed up, but then he dialed it back and added that he wasn't suggesting anything. Next best bit: Anderson Cooper asks King what he thinks about memoirs, and King goes into this monologue about where he started out in radio, and interviewing Bobby Darin, or maybe it was Danny Thomas...worth it just for the increased confusion playing out on Cooper's face as he starts wondering if this story will ever get anywhere...)