Freywatch: Weingarten, Wiesel and more

By Sarah on January 24, 2006 8:44 AM

First things first: how’s the book doing in light of the brouhaha? So far, the answer is very, very well. So well, in fact, that A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is #1 and MY FRIEND LEONARD is #15 on the NYT’s January 29 edition of the bestseller list — for non-fiction. Our sister at FishbowlNY said it best (and Gawker seemed to forget that agreement means attribution…)

Then there’s the fact that addiction counselors had told Oprah producers that there might be something hinky about the book even before the segment aired, and those who worked at Hazelden pretty much debunk Frey’s assertion that his writing about the rehab center is essentially true:

Carol Colleran, who worked for 17 years in the Hazelden system and is now a certified addiction professional in West Palm Beach, Fla., said she sent her complaints about the book to the Winfrey program by e-mail in November. Ms. Colleran also posted questions about the book on Amazon.com that month.

“I have had young people say to me that if they had a child who was having problems, they would never send them to treatment after reading that book,” Ms. Colleran said.

This week’s issue of Time Magazine asked Elie Wiesel 10 questions and well, of course one of them had to be about Mr. Frey, even though Wiesel “didn’t want to speak of that controversy” though he did add the classic that with memoir, “you must be honest. You must be truthful.” The rest of the interview has much more substance about what impact NIGHT will have on new readers and why he loves to read and teach Albert Camus.

Frey, on the other hand, seems to love to read Jay McInerney’s new novel THE GOOD LIFE enough to provide a blurb at Amazon.com.

After the jump, Marc Weingarten, author of The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe,Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution, shares his comments via email.

I would say that any student of journalism who has read, say, Dispatches, or Fear and Loathing: Campaign Trail ’72 would certainly not lump those books in with A Million Little Pieces. Frey was trying to entice readers with lurid sensationalism in an egregiously fraudulent manner; Hunter Thompson was using twisted metaphor and humor with the precision of a master polemicist to underscore his thesis about the dry rot of American politics, and Michael Herr was perhaps unwisely) taking creative license to cut through the Westmoreland spin-doctoring and the body-bag stats that explained nothing in order to really tell the real story of what it was like for the grunts on the ground in Vietnam during the war’s darkest days. Herr certainly didn’t need to create composite characters and I’ve often wondered why he did – Dispatches is such a powerful piece of writing that it doesn’t need gratutious fabulism to shore it up.

Now, I think those stories, and perhaps other New Journalism touchstones, might have run with disclaimers stating exactly what was being manipulated, but I find it curious that Fahrenheit 9/11 didn’t engender this kind of Frey-bashing media frenzy. 100 million dollars in net receipts later, few took Michael Moore to task for his factual errors – perhaps because they agreed with him?

Adversarial journalism is a powerful thing – people are willing to except factual lapses if they agree with the ‘essential truth’ of the issue being discussed. And I really don’t object to that – people aren’t morons, they can distinguish between a straight-forward reported piece and something that’s being played around with and molded in order to illustrate a larger point about politics, culture. etc.

But in the final analysis, alerting people to these manipulations beforehand would not, in my view, diminish readers’ enjoyment of the work.