Emotional Truth



By now you'd be pretty hard pressed not have heard about the saga of James Frey and A Million Little Pieces, his memoir. It tells a harrowing story of man trapped in a crime- and drug-ridden death spiral, and how he redeemed himself and became a good person.

Only thing is, the whole death spiral part isn't really true. The Smoking Gun did an excellent expose on the novel, and in the end it's tough not to to see Frey as an over-privilaged frat boy who had some real substance abuse problems, but nothing like what was in the book. The criminal history he goes on about in detail and at length turns out to be completely made up. Frey's defenders, Oprah among them, have rallied around the idea that while the facts may be false, the book still has "emotional truth."

I believe Frey, who had aspirations to be a writer long before his memoir became a hit, may not have honestly thought anybody would take A Million Little Pieces to be anything other that fiction. For one thing, many of the events portrayed are ridiculous. In one part Frey flies on a commercial flight to Chicago, telling us that he's covered in every disgusting bodily fluid possible and has several grievous injuries, including a puncture in his cheek and both eyes swollen shut. Yet he also calls and talks to a flight attendant, who doesn't seem to notice anything is wrong.

And then there's the style of the novel. It's done is a mock-illiterate mode, with lots of bad sentence structure and inappropriate capitalization. An example:

"We head north to the Cabin. Along the way I learn that my Parents, who live in Tokyo, have been in the States for the last two weeks on business. At four a.m. they received a call from a friend of mine who was with me at a Hospital and had tracked them down in a hotel in Michigan. He told them that I had fallen face first down a Fire Escape and that he thought they should find me some help. "

But once Frey sold the book as nonfiction, and Oprah embraced it, he was forced to keep up the lie that this was what really happened to him. To some extent I think even Oprah must have know some of the book was false. After all, in the book Frey confesses to beating and possibly killing a priest in France. If that were true I think even Oprah would agree Frey should be rotting in jail right now, not making millions of dollars for writing about it.

I do find the concept of "emotional truth" pretty interesting. Does the book become less powerful just because it isn't really stuff that happened? I think so, but I'm not sure I can exactly explain why.

Posted: Sun - January 15, 2006 at      

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