Still Bored With Frey

January 11th, 2006 · 4 Comments
by Booksquare

Word on the street is Random House will be offering refunds to those who bought James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces under false pretenses. There is a catch (there’s always a catch): this refund is available to those who purchased from the publisher directly. Makes us wonder about those numbers…

Frey’s writing career seems to be bumping along just fine, though it’s still early in the scandal.

In other publishing news, Angelina Jolie is preg…wait, oops, wrong headline. Let’s start again. In other publishing news, Oprah Winfrey has broken her (day or two long) silence on the issue and come out in support of Frey. She called in to Larry King’s hour-long tough questioning of the author…oh man, we cannot continue. This is the worst kind of writing. This is awful. We still can’t work up the proper outrage or support. We apologize. We simply don’t trust pop memoirs — heck, we barely trust non-pop memoirs. A person writing about himself or herself has an ulterior motive. Sure, sometimes we’ll play along, but mostly we expect there’s a self-serving nature behind the work. It’s not our fault — we were born cynical.

On the other hand, one wonders how Oprah made it through the busy King lines. If you were trying to get past a call screener, wouldn’t you say you’re Oprah Winfrey? And if you’re the call screener, do you believe the caller? Doesn’t everyone claim to be Oprah just to get on the air?

File Under: Square Pegs

4 responses so far ↓

  • David Thayer // Jan 12, 2006 at 6:53 am

    Scandal Mangement Ltd. can rush you your scandal kit free of charge! We specialize in literary scandals! We use exclamation points. Because we care!

  • Lorra // Jan 12, 2006 at 7:59 am

    Okay – pop quiz:

    What do Oprah Winfrey and George Bush have in common?

  • Walt // Jan 12, 2006 at 10:33 pm

    Apparently, the publisher is adding an extra note to make sure that readers don’t get the wrong impression and start believing the non-fiction book contains much in the way of truth:

    NEW YORK Jan 12, 2006 — Future hardcover and paperback editions of James Frey’s disputed memoir of addiction, “A Million Little Pieces,” will include a brief author’s note that refers to the content of the book, his publisher said Thursday.

    Doubleday spokeswoman Alison Rich declined to offer details about the note or to comment on why it was being added. She would not say if the note was an acknowledgment often found in memoirs but not in “A Million Little Pieces” that names and events had been altered.
    http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=1500552

    Kind of hard to alter the deaths of the two girls Frey claims to have had relationships with. But, I’m sure it’s for a good cause. His pocketbook.

  • Booksquare // Jan 14, 2006 at 10:09 pm

    I still wonder about those who fell for this in the first place — I must be the only non-fiction believer in the universe…

    This story has, actually, become more interesting to me as a sideshow. It seems like a “Yeah, made it all (or most of all) up. I’m very sorry for all the harm I’ve caused” would have helped. But nooo. The spin machine overruled simplicity.