Out of the Freying Pan and into the Fire
Published January 10th, 2006 | 
“Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death.” – Samuel Butler
It seems to me that The Smoking Gun’s recent outing of author James Frey, whose memoir, A Million Little Pieces was one of the most successful books published in the last year, is much ado about nothing.
I haven’t read the book, so I can’t judge the literary merits of Frey’s writing. However, I do think that the notion that Frey has fabricated parts of his memoir is hardly newsworthy. Despite the media spin on this story, memoir is not journalism — it is a form of creative nonfiction. Memory is not an empirical record of our lives. As such, a memoir isn’t necessarily a complete factual record of a person’s experience. If a memoir is well done is can embody the essential truth of one’s life, answering certain questions and rendering the emotional landscape of our past. Does it really matter whether or not Frey was the hardened criminal he presented himself to be in his book if that is the way he saw himself at the time? Is the story any less “true”? At worst, the book should have been marketed as a novel. So get over it Smoking Gun. Frey isn’t a con artist; he’s just a writer.
