I am sure that those of you in the UK haven't had to withstand the brouhaha that we have over Frey's, "A Million Little Pieces." The author had sold the book as his autobiography, but thesmokinggun.com found it was riddled with lies. Oy vey...this was nearly as bad as Jennifer Aniston's and Brad Pitt's splitting up! I mean, we Americans do have our priorities!
Anyway, today I finally read a halfway sane article on it in the Tribune, entitled, "Sorry Oprah. It's Still a Good Book!" The author, Julia Keller, wondered if now people like Frank McCourt with "Angela's Ashes" will be Freyed? Hmmm, I wonder if that word with stick! She also wondered if thesmokinggun.com has a Dublin branch.
Seriously, the guy was on all sorts of drugs. When you write a book from memory about being on drugs, what is the chance that you will get the facts straight?
I must say that I hadn't heard of this. I don't know if it's because the furore hasn't crossed the pond, or or I somehow missed it. I took a look at TSG's article. Was this James Frey well-known in the USA before the book was published, or did he become a celebrity on the back of his book? (The report runs to six pages, so I may have missed that part.)
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Apparently Frey's book had been fairly popular and had been out for 3 years. I am not sure because I hadn't read it. He wasn't well-known, though, before the book. What really seemed to bring him fame was that Oprah Winfrey (do you know her?) used his book as her "Book of the Month." Oprah is very famous over here, and that meant that his book began selling quite well. That's when the blogs went to work, and poor Oprah, who loves her image, had to apologize to the public for recommending a book of lies. She had Frey on her program, I hear, and literally fried him!
Mind you, this all took up pages and pages in our newspapers, and it was headline news.
I know shows like Jerry Springer can get violent, but that's a bit much! 