Guess James Frey’s memory was faultier than imagined

By Sarah on January 9, 2006 9:15 AM

First, no matter what your opinion is on the matter, one has to give props to The Smoking Gun for simply going where few in publishing will bother to go: dusty basements, long-forgotten public records, and honest to goodness legwork. It’s like they are actual, I dunno, journalists or something.

Which makes their six-week investigation of James Frey’s claims all the more interesting, because not only did they manage to refute almost all of the claims he made in A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, but did so in meticulous fashion. What one’s left with is the hollow ring of Frey’s motivation for his next book, a proper novel: “I’m looking forward to showing people that I can write fiction.”

What’s buried, to some degree, is A MILLION LITTLE PIECES’ publishing history. 17 publishers rejected the book before Nan Talese picked it up for her imprint at Doubleday (where Sean McDonald was working at the time before moving over to Riverhead.) The catch? The book had to be retooled from the work of fiction Frey had originally shopped. More to the point, what did those 17 publishers see — fiction or non-fiction? And why did Doubleday decide the book worked better as a memoir?

And the biggest question of all: doesn’t anyone properly fact-check these things?

Still, it’s pretty unlikely the book will be pulled from publication, though I bet future editions will have one of those handy disclaimers that “some dates and names have been changed” and the like. Memoir’s always been the black sheep of non-fiction, existing in that shadowy world between true fiction and dry non-fiction, because telling a good story and telling what’s true are two very different skills — and sometimes, the twain simply can’t be met.

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