OK, so last fall Oprah resurrected her book club to introduce a new book: James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Oprah raved about this book and I liked the look of the cover (yes, I do judge a book by its cover, the cover is important), but after reading a quick excerpt on Amazon, I determined that the book seemed too damn depressing for me. So no, I haven't read the book.
But I sure have been following this week's events. In case you're living under a rock, Mr. Frey was busted by The Smoking Gun website for alleged "inaccuaracies" (OK, let's call it what it is: lies) in his book. Apparently ol' Jimmy is a major embellisher. His people and Oprah and everyone else involved have been doing damage control all week.
Why do I care about this? Simply stated, A Million Little Pieces was touted as a memoir. Mr. Frey is a now a very rich man, thanks to Oprah (whom I adore, by the way--she's not my problem here), but his memoir was apparently filled with untruths.
Now any aspiring writer knows that it is much easier to get a nonfiction book published than a fiction book. And I read that Mr. Frey first tried to sell the book as fiction, but no one wanted it. It seemed much more "interesting" marketed as memoir, I suppose. So how much of it is even true? Is it a memoir or is it fiction? Maybe a little of both. Either way, I feel that the readers of this book were duped. Big time. It doesn't matter if you paid money for this book, borrowed it from a friend or from the library, you were still duped into thinking that what you read all really happened.
We may never know how much of this book was truth or fiction. Either way, James Frey made out like a bandit.
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