"For most of the 20th century, when people like me grew up wanting to be writers, people like Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer—none of these people got into writing and didn't take it fucking seriously. They got into it saying, 'I'm going to write books that change people's lives. I'm going to write the best book of my generation. I'm going to be remembered as someone who changed the way people think and write and live. I don't have a problem saying I'm the fucking best.'"
—James Frey, February 2003

Over the past few months, James Frey has become infinitely more interesting than the books he has written, but that might be exactly what he had in mind. The embattled author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard was outed by the Smoking Gun on January 8, over two years after the publication of his first book, for fabricating large chunks of his memoirs. The article exposed a pivotal three-month stint in jail to be nothing more than a few unchained hours in an Ohio county police department for drunk driving. The investigation also called into question other key claims in the book, including the suicide of Lily, the book's female love interest, and a harrowing anecdote about a high school classmate's fatal car accident. Oprah Winfrey, who had launched Frey into authorial superstardom by choosing Pieces for her book club in September, hauled the disgraced writer onto her show and berated him for "betraying" millions of readers. Meanwhile, the literati closed their ranks—Frey is a liar.

But Frey saw it differently. Consistent with his baffling tendency to compare himself to some of the most revered names in the American literary canon, Frey said in an interview shortly after the scandal broke that he viewed his doctored memoir as continuing a tradition of autobiographical fiction by authors like "Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski." When it was pointed out that those authors did not sell their work as nonfiction, Frey countered that the genre of memoir had not yet been invented then—a thought as neat and uncomplicated as it is incorrect. Although his bravado is ridiculous and off-putting, the notion that the fake memoir is a pre-existing genre, used by those venerated authors, is compelling. In seeking to convey the "essential truth" and "underlying message" of his life, Frey may have had a right to appropriate the authority that the magical word "nonfiction" lends to a text, and the authors he admires may have done the same.

It seems that everyone who has read Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms knows that Hemingway himself was an ambulance driver in World War I and had his heart broken by an American nurse. This autobiographical information is made a part of the discourse surrounding the novel, often put on the jacket-flap of the book. Suddenly, Henry, the protagonist, becomes newly fascinating for the reader—how much of Henry is Hemingway? The autobiographical information lends authority to the tale, and the author has entered the story as a character himself, changing the relationship between the reader and the text. Meanwhile, Hemingway, comfortably fortified in the "fiction" category, can rewrite himself and his life with impunity.

Yet Frey found himself sitting on Oprah's couch, guiltily admitting to making himself seem "badder" and more "aggressive" [direct quotes] in his memoir than he was in reality. Frey spluttered and squirmed, and admitted that as a "coping mechanism," he might have written about himself as a person different from how he was in actuality. Hemingway would never be subjected to such indignity. After all, he wrote fiction. And yet, his non-fictional presence loomed over the novel and capitalized upon readers' fascination with true-life experiences of authors, while simultaneously lending his story a quasi-factual legitimacy. In this light, Frey's shortcut to Hemingway-like authority—calling his book nonfiction—looks similar to what his literary influences did almost half a century ago in writing what most considered to be autobiographical fiction. Nonetheless, Hemingway never promised his readers anything, not even the "emotional truth" of his own experiences, a phrase that has become a catchword in the debate around Frey's book.

In fact, it is often the "emotional truth" that is most tempting for an author to dispense with or alter in a story based on personal experiences. In A Million Little Pieces, while Frey writes about self-loathing almost as much as he does vomiting, he rarely portrays himself as vulnerable, weak, or insignificant. He is a rebel, refusing to conform to the religion of the Twelve Steps and coolly using physical violence on bullies within the Rehab Facility. Frey lies about concrete events; doing time in jail serves only to support the fundamental change he made in emotional and personal truth from weakling to tough guy. It is this shift in emotional truth that makes the book read like a fantasy of recovery. The protagonist seems over-simplified, too defiant to be true. Every major hurdle he overcomes is described like a scene in a bad Western film—Frey staring down a full glass of booze, Frey saving his girlfriend by running into a crackhouse and wresting her from the grips of a villain, Frey squeezing tennis balls during sans-anesthesia root canal operations, etc. Millions of people read A Million Little Pieces. It has been translated into over twenty languages. And yet, I cannot help but think—admittedly in 20/20 hindsight—that the work is devoid of the emotional truth that supporters champion as justification for its embellishments.

When Frey originally tried to market his book as a novel, almost twenty publishing houses rejected it. But the moment the word "memoir" entered the picture, Doubleday snatched the book up. If A Million Little Pieces was not attractive to publishers as a novel, maybe that is because it lacks the emotional truth that makes a novel resonate with readers, despite our knowledge that it is not factually "true." As readers, we know that a novel's story and characters are made up, but good novels still feel real and important to us. An embellished memoir might just be the perfect genre with which to bypass the introspection needed to make fictional people and events alive and real. A book in the nonfiction section does not need to work as hard as a novel to create something a reader will believe, and thus, relate to.

Frey's grandiose claims to kinship with authors like Hemingway are rendered ridiculous by more than just the inferiority of his prose. Such literary heroes became famous through their fiction first, and then began to lend a strong non-fictional presence to their work due to their readers' interest in the personalities behind the books. If Frey wanted to join the ranks of these authors as a writer fascinating to readers in his own right, fictionalizing his life and calling it truth was apparently an expedient, if dishonest way to go about it. While Hemingway's non-fictional presence was intentionally used to lend credibility to his novels—the sheer number of his biographies attest to the interest his life has attracted—he first became famous on the merits of his fiction. Frey misrepresented his story about himself as completely factual, thus appropriating an authority that a fiction writer must earn, through, for example, the creation of believable characters and dialogue. Frey's shortcut to fame was built upon lying to a readership to gain their trust in his outlandish experiences—and, in a sense, this illusion of honesty meant giving them what they wanted.

Indeed, perhaps the reader is to blame in this mess. Our fascination with authors, our desire to believe in concrete yet compelling truths, people and events, has created a lucrative market for fake memoirists. We want the glamour of fiction, but we want it to be true. Book jackets hinting at autobiography are no longer enough for us. The doctored memoir is a perfect shortcut for the less talented writer to capitalize on that willingness to believe. If, as the New York Press declared months ago, James Frey is "the greatest writer of his generation," then perhaps this generation, used to having it all, has finally found what it wants—more than fiction and more than truth.

 

Liz C. Goodwin is a History and Literature concentrator in Eliot House who enjoys Twizzlers and baby tigers.