The First Cut Won’t Hurt at All

I’ve seen all sorts of reportorial disclosures in my day, but Salon book editor Hillary Frey unleashes a curveball in her complete evisceration of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Two paragraphs in, she says the Oprah-crowned memoirist “shares my father’s name but is no relation.” Shares my father’s name? Are we working towards a minimum word count or something?

At any rate, her trashing of the book is an interesting about face for Salon; two years ago, Louis Bayard called A Million Little Pieces “the most scalding account of addiction in recent memory” with “a rolling, pulsing style that really moves — an acquired taste, perhaps, but undeniably striking.” Hillary Frey, on the other hand,just sees James Frey’s prose as “a Kerouacian, expletive-laced, bare-bones kind of writing that eschews punctuation and radiates machismo,” and asks, “Is this even writing?” She also sneers at his now-legendary interview with the New York Observer, which Bayard quotes more extensively, tempering his criticisms with literary sympathy.

The bigger problem for Hillary, though, is that she just can’t get as excited about Oprah chatting with a nonfiction writer as she did when novelists were invited into the studio. Is Oprah’s book club “losing its identity as a literary feature,” or is one book too little data to predict a trend? What do you think?

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