Update II (1/27 @ 3:48 p.m.): The bloggers and radio show hosts known as Pundit Review will interview The Smoking Gun’s managing editor Andrew Goldberg this Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. EST on WRKO in Boston. Check it out. By the way, the bloggers finally posted a photo of themselves.
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Admitting when you’re wrong can be very difficult.
Some of you may have been following the story of James Frey, exaggerator extraordinaire and author of A Million Little Pieces. An appearance on Oprah’s show netted him fame and cash. She’d selected his autobiography for her world famous book club, but his book contained more fiction than actual events from his life.
In his memoir, Frey claimed he’d been a drug-addicted bad boy, raising hell and running down cops. He spent months in prison and managed to tame a beast of a man by reading him the classics. While in a drug treatment center, he met and started a relationship with a fellow addict named Lilly, who eventually hung herself, according to Frey. The book depicts Frey as a reckless, dangerous, and overly-macho tough guy who beat the odds and overcame his addiction in a dramatic way.
Frey’s book inspired millions, including the talk show queen, who gushed on national TV about his “life story.” Some doubted Frey’s version of events when it was first published in 2003, but an appearance on Oprah thrust the dubious tome into the national and scrutinizing spotlight.
The Smoking Gun (TSG), a site well-known for posting mug shots of celebrities, searched for mug shots of Frey. After running into brick walls in what should have been a routine task, TSG smelled a rat and began a journalistic-style investigation into the book’s “facts.” The result of the investigation is a well-written, well-researched and must-read piece called A Million Little Lies. Frey emerges as a relatively normal, occasional pot-smoking college boy with too much time and imagination on his hands.
He must have been sweating bullets, not because his lies and exaggerations were exposed or that his readers would be disappointed. What Frey probably feared most was the wrath of Oprah Winfrey (I remembered her last name. I’m impressed…). Frey’s publisher, Random House, didn’t seem worried about the people who pay its bills, either. They were as afraid of Oprah’s potential backlash as heathens are of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
But they both got a reprieve. Temporarily. Frey appeared on Larry King Live to “explain” the *discrepancies, and Oprah unexpectedly called in, lending her support. Read the show’s transcript.
(*According to TSG, there’s no evidence Frey spent more than a few unchained hours in jail as opposed to months, as he wrote in his book. But Frey maintains, “This is my recollection of my life.” Reporters from TSG spoke with the police officers involved, and they said there’s no way Frey spent months in jail. And he didn’t even describe the inside of the jail accurately.)
Well, it now seems that Ms. Thing has changed her mind (A woman’s prerogative.). According to the Gray Lady, Oprah said Frey “betrayed millions of readers.” Frey is scheduled to appear on Oprah’s show this afternoon (4:00 p.m. EST in DC), but a blogger at Gawker got a “sneak preview” and live-blogged it.
For the first time in years, I may watch Oprah’s show.
I really don’t care about this one way or another, but it’s fun watching all the lies come to light in such a public and gaudy way. People are picking this book apart. The Freakonomics guys are fact-checking other events in the book.
Here’s the real issue: people bought the book because they believed all those things happened to James Frey. When the lies and exaggerations were uncovered, Frey and his defenders said that memoirs aren’t 100 percent accurate. It’s all about recollection. True, but that doesn’t cut it in Frey’s case. His book contains outright lies. He even confessed to the queen that he made up stuff. By the way, Oprah may have gotten a heads-up about Frey before his first appearance but brought him on the show anyway. More from Google News.
Speaking of which, a few readers e-mailed about my paradigm-shifting confession. I haven’t made it yet. When I do, believe me, you will definitely hear about it.
Addendum: The Frey Fiasco is truly fascinating. His web site is down because of excessive bandwidth, so reads a message from the systems administrator, but others doubt this claim, too. I should be working, but The Frey Fallout is so interesting. 
An article in the Chicago Tribune goes into more detail about the show:
Winfrey’s apology [to the audience] and pointed questions about incidents and people in the book appeared to take Frey by surprise as he sat across the couch from Winfrey today as they had done during a much more convivial show four months earlier.
“It is difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped,” Winfrey told a startled-looking Frey who licked his lips often before speaking. “More importantly, I feel you betrayed millions of readers…As I sit here today, I don’t know what is true, and I don’t know what isn’t.”
Winfrey looked near tears and her audience gasped when Frey revealed for the first time that Lilly, a central character in the book, didn’t commit suicide by hanging, but instead slashed her wrists.
4:05 p.m.: Just a couple of notes. I’m watching Oprah. Frey says TSG did a “good job” dealing with some of the discrepancies. He admitted he wasn’t in jail for 87 days, for instance. More like two? Oprah is asking probing questions. James Frey is on national TV confessing that he LIED to her and the readers. I’m sure someone will create a transcript of this show. Only six minutes into it, I’m mesmerized. Oprah is fit to be tied! She said she regrets the Larry King phone call.
James Frey is finished. He’d better go underground for a while and adopt a pseudonym for future books.
The audience is gasping, shocked that Frey is downplaying and trivializing his lies. For instance, in the book he wrote that he had two root canals with no painkillers. Turns out he received Novocaine, a painkiller. He suddenly remembered.
“Why did you lie?” asked Oprah.
“That was my recollection,” he says. The audience gasped.
“So there were two root canals?” asked Oprah.
“I…I think so,” he whimpered.
4:21: Frey looks terrified. His publisher has joined the show after the break. Nan Talese of Random House is defending the deceptive story. Should have been published as a novel. The whole lot of them were in on the scam because they knew this book would sell, sell, sell, if people thought it were true. There’s a whole lot of CYA going on!
Oprah says she’s embarrassed. Why didn’t the publisher verify the facts? Talese stuttered something about people’s “stories” and how they affect the reader, blah, blah, blah. Oprah says don’t call it a memoir if the events aren’t true.
4:36: Richard Cohen, who called Oprah deluded, is on the show. Oprah thanked him for his criticism and admitted he was right about her. Cohen took Talese to task and said these big publishing houses need to cut this out and hire fact checkers for $30,000 a year to fact-check memoirs. A fact checker would have noticed the discrepancies right away. I repeat, Frey is finished!
An author’s note will be added in subsequent printings to indicate that the “true” book is full of lies. That’s a paraphrase. 
Michelle Malkin’s got the video. More news. After all is said and done, Oprah has been very gracious to James Frey. She urges him to come clean because if he lied about other events, the truth will come out.
Update (1/27): I knew somebody would check this out. Frey told Oprah that his recovering addict girlfriend didn’t hang herself; she slit her wrists. Why did he do that? He wanted to change details about people (to protect identity?). Well, somone has done some digging to find out whether this Lilly “character” even slit her wrists.
Steve Levitt over at the Freakonomics blog has the answer. I’m patiently waiting for someone to discover that “Lilly” didn’t exist at all. She’s just a figment, like many things in the book, of Frey’s active imagination.
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La Shawn:
Frey’s “recollections” remind me a lot of Bill Clinton’s “forgetting” when he was in the White House”.
If the President could convince millions that his recollections were so poor, why shouldn’t some two bit author and talk show queen also believe that “forgetting” was OK?
I work for a TV station that airs Oprah at 4pm and again on tape on their secondary station at 10pm. We tape the show at 10am when it’s first fed down on satellite and prepare it for the 10pm airing (we air the second Oprah satellite feed live at 4pm on our primary station).
Anyway, I got an early look at the Frey episode. I watched it all, mostly in fast forward (it would take too long to explain why) and what did my wandering eyes spy but good old L.A. Times columnist Joel “I don’t support the troops” Stein in a series of taped comments. What I found highly amusing is that after the initial batch of taped comments including ones by Stein, Oprah referred to Stein and the other two people as “journalists.” So should we now have a show devoted to how Oprah was deceived into thinking Joel Stein is a journalist?
awww… dagnabbit. I’m supposed to be getting work done and now I have to turn on Oprah, of all people.
I blame you. ;o)
Fascinating stuff, Jewels! Frey is getting the third degree.
Bless her heart, but Oprah can be terribly naive sometimes. The book she has chosen now is “Night” by Elie Wiesel and its another fiction or “embelished nonfiction” title that she seems to be taking seriously.
Demonization of those who came before us doesn’t sit well with me. The winner of a war writes the history and hindsight is 20/20. In several european countries you can be imprisoned simply for questioning aspects of the Holocaust. If I voiced the possibility that certain furnaces were used to burn bodies to prevent the spread of diseases such as typhus, including those of Nazi soldiers, and weren’t used to burn Jews alive… I could be imprisoned.
In the future, how will we be judged? Assuming global warming or some other environmental disaster occurs, think how evilly we will be portrayed for just being normal people. Perhaps in the future capitalism will be universally regarded as evil, and profitting from the labor of another will not be, “good business sense” or “enterprising” but “oppressive” and “backwards”. Imagine the uproar if some day medical research locates the scientific equivalent of the “soul”… and its also in animals. Perhaps some day people would even learn not to judge.
I expect Oprah will be shocked and sympathetic and compassionate and understanding all at once at the attrocities of the holocaust “Night” describes. Meanwhile the genocide in Darfur will continue along with so much more that I don’t wish to dwell on.
As pointless as these rambling have been, I guess the real question for me is, “Would I want to know?”. Would I rather just read and believe, or read and be skeptical.. never truly knowing the truth of what is described to me. I remember in grade school being taught how the civil war was fought “to free the slaves”, then in high school I took a class specifically dealing with civil war history. In this class, I was told that the slaves were primarily freed to cause disruption in the Confederate states. The Emancipation Proclamation only declared the slaves in the Confederate held areas free, not those in more neutral or Union states. Although Lincoln was not quite the hero I recall him being made out to be, I still feel better for knowing.
I always try to remember that people are rarely as good or as bad as they are made to appear. We should all be open to the truth, because nothing we believe to be true do we expect to be a lie.
I read/heard that he [allegedly] wrote the book as fiction, and it couldn’t sell, so he created a “memoir.”
I read about that when the stuff hit the fan several weeks ago. He couldn’t sell it as fiction and repackaged it as a “true” story.
Wow! I shoulda watched! (But then again I am a guy…;) )
Wow. That was an interesting display there. Is it just me, or did it seem a tad scripted on Oprah’s part? We have the opening scene, where she acts mad, then the plot thickens as she expresses her sadness and embarrassment, and then closing scenes where she tries to end on a happier note- kind of like “well now, I’m glad you’ve learned your lesson and now we can all move on. yea for us!”
The interesting thing was watching Frey’s face through the whole thing. kinda took the wind out of his sails, didn’t it.
Frank from comment #1- did it also remind you of Reagan’s “forgetting” after Iran/Contra or Scooter Libby’s “forgetting” in the CIA leak investigation?
I’m just sayin’.
Anyway- I would be a little bit more impressed with Oprah’s coming clean had she done it when the news first broke that Frey’s book was basically fiction. But I think she was more concerned with looking like an ass after peddling the book for so long. Then, when more and more people were slamming Frey AND HER, she suddenly changed her tune.
I’ve worked in the field of substance abuse treatment and basically, his lies and misrepresentations have a real-world effect- he slams groups like AA/NA and makes people think that to stop using drugs, all you have to do is “hold on”- what a bunch of claptrap.
I have come across a lot of people like James Frey in the psychiatric hospital where I worked doing addictions treatment- he’s what we call a narcissist and possibly a sociopath (no, not psychopath)- his willingness to lie outright about things like the death of a friend in order to make it all about HIM, are key character traits of many addicts. Lying becomes second nature and I can’t help but wonder if Mr. Frey is really totally “clean” at this point.
Wonderful write up. But let’s stop sugar coating the truth of what happened. Oprah tried to sell “the truth is irrelevant” and got taken to task for it. Until proven to me otherwise, I categorize Oprah as an exploiter - she is a “god” unto herself. Its 3p in LA, time for me to personally see the travesty of Oprah feeding another lie - “feel sorry me (Oprah) because I was duped” - No she wasn’t!
James Frey and Nan Talese, I would like you to meet Mary Mapes and Dan Rather.
What’s up with all the lies in the media these days?
Okay well LSB I have to like speculate on your upcoming revelation because I have thought up some funny ones (please don’t take these seriously
1. you aren’t really black
2. you’re actually a Canadian
3. you’re Condi Rice’s illegitimate neice
4. you’re Oprah’s neice
Well?
James Frey: Want to Get Away?
My thoughts: Why does the New York Times have him on the bestseller list under Non-Fiction?
Other thoughts: Oprah’s hair sure looked nice today. Very sleek and shiny. I liked her light-colored lipstick.
I guess if you’re gonna interrogate a liar, you might as well look your best doing it.
Jewel, I think Oprah lightened up on him at the end, because he had apparently made a comment to her during the break about hoping he could find a gun backstage. Oprah said, “And I hope you were joking about that comment about looking for a gun backstage.”
I think she got nervous about what the next headline from him would be, but all in all I really enjoyed the interview…beware the wrath of Oprah…LOL
I think that by now, Oprah should have a variety of recipes for crow.
Her hair did look amazingly nice. I was totally mesmerized. Also I think she really did take the high road on this one (tho I only saw a clip online, not the whole thing.) I just hope she’ll get one of her zillions of aides to look into book club selections in future.
“One of the things about addicts is that they have this “mischaracterization” problem. While still in active addiction it is quite easy to mischaracterize yourself as a “normal” person. The official name, of course, is denial.
There is a blindness to the things that are going on. There is an inability to come to grips with the way reality just doesn’t want to match up with what’s going on in the mind of the addict.
The same things continues in recovery. I have heard many drunkalogues (extended monologues about the way things used to be.) In many of these the events that used to be denied are now made all the more interesting with extrapolations, grandiosity, and extensions of the truth. That may very well be part of the story behind the James Frey story.
A drunkalogue has become public and the addict knows that it’s the truth behind the stories that is far more powerful than the details.”
You might want to read the rest of Wanderings of a Post Modern Pilgrim. He’s a recovering alcoholic, minister and an addiction counsellor.
The best and the brightest at the WaPo and the Times fail to point to something that ought to be obvious.
A druggie in the course of his/her addiction seriously screws over a LOT of people. Significant others, spouses, children, friends, neighbors, even innocent passersby.
And then, a few years later, the druggie has the bright idea to write a book. Guess what? These books SELL. So he/she makes millions TALKING ABOUT screwing over a lot of people. A glorification of the days when he/she got over, big time, and there wasn’t a damned thing any one of them could do about it.
So in effect the druggie’s victims get screwed TWICE. It must really hurt them to see the druggie getting so richly rewarded, while they sit there, still bleeding, watching Oprah.
Oh. My. God.
A hustler is always a hustler; James Frey’s next book will be “How I Duped Oprah: Now I’m Really Telling the Truth!!”
Oprah?? Who’s Oprah??
I’m sick and tired of those who venerate
“St. Oprah”.
How much do you think Frey was paid so Oprah could give her “apology” yesterday????? Sorry but this is America, Frey got a little “sumtin, sumtin” to help make Oprah look good yesterday.
You know, I never thought of that, Renee. Frey looked like a scared rabbit, though. He seemed shocked that Oprah was going off. Don’t know what he expected, upsetting that diva. I bet he’s learned his lesson.
Nan Talese really came off looking like a fool.
I think Random House should fire her. According to her, anyone can walk in off the street and say anything and call it a memoir—-because memoirs are basically stories, and “…we all learn from stories”, says Nan.
I think we should all write our memoirs. I’m Oprah’s child. I’m the child of Oprah and GWB. I’m going to take it to Nan Talese.
I was already pretty upset with Oprah since she gave credibility to an exMormon woman’s biography or memoir, Martha Beck, who wrote that her father, Hugh Nibley,a well thought of intellectual LDS educator and writer, had sexually abused her as a child.. This charge was based on hypnotically induced “memories”. The other 8 grown children of Hugh Nibley have stood behind their father, he died recently. Martha Beck, a lesbian who is estranged now from here Mormon family, was supported emotionally by Oprah and given much TV time. So don’t tell us this is the first time you’ve been dooped Oprah. Its just wrong for Oprah to lend credibility to persons of questionable character, esp. if others are hurt in the process.
What if instead of judging books based on their authors’ celebrity or notoriety, we judged books on the content? Wouldn’t that be the reasonable thing to do? To pick out meaning from the text itself–that is what it means to read, after all. Anything we might say about the book’s author is a symptom of the deplorable celebrity culture and any judgments we project onto a book because of our prejudice about its author a sequela of the same disease.
Would you accuse Jesus of being a liar for “making up” the parable of the Prodigal Son?
Frey’s book is purported to be non-fiction, representation of a subject considered as fact. Based on that label, people bought the book with the expectation that the material is true. Consumers have a right to get what they pay for and seek remedies if they don’t. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I happen to like living in a world that at least tries to adhere to standards. - Admin
I read that O’s producer’s were told in advance that the memoir was fake yet went ahead with it. Also, her indignation and anger were about as real as Frey’s prison stay. Both only fessed up because they were exposed.
Could I please address TeeJay and Holocaust comments? I know it’s off topic, and I apologize in advance. But as a child in the 50’s, I saw news film of mass Jewish graves, dead, naked bodies who had been massacred. Our troops and the reporters with them shot these films. If you read any of the memoirs of soldiers who entered Germany, you can find the TRUTH about the Holocuast. Indeed, there was one.
And, by the way, we do need to know if something is REAL or MADE UP. Makes a huge difference and not just in literature.
And there are GOOD people who have faults, and BAD people who can deceive. There IS objective truth.
Things like this exercise in bleating nonsense are why I prefer working with, and reading, fiction and satire…People deal with it a lot better, and thoroughly enjoy it, when you’re telling the truth disguised as a lie rather than telling a lie disguised as the truth.
Poor James Frey. This could be enough to drive him back into the arms of Mary Jane.
Totally off topic…
But isn’t it great that we live in a country where the person who:
1. is the RICHEST (or pretty close to it)
2. can say the name of a book they read and millions will follow suit
3. celebrities fight each other to be a guest on their show
4. has their own religion named after them (with their own gospel message of inclusiveness and intolerance)
5. can go on national TV, on their own show, and rip a white man apart for lying
IS (drum roll please)…
a BLACK WOMAN!!! (and she didn’t even have a silver spoon in her mouth, light-skin, or any of the other stereotypes)
For some reason the race pimps (including Hilary who is still hanging out on a plantation somewhere) missed that one
Ya just gotta luv America!
Bah! She’s only doing face saving.
When I saw the first show that James Frey was on with Oprah, something inside me told me that he wasn’t being upfront about something. If you watched that show, people in the audience and Oprah,were asking him questions about those very same incidents in the book,that he’s now proven to embellished. James Frey during that hold hour could not give any good explanations for those questions being asked and I have never been on drugs, but read,heard and witness the devastation of what drugs can do to a person. James Frey stories are almost superman like. I never bought the book. It sounded Hollywood. By the way wasn’t he a screen writer?
As for Oprah, will somebody be so kind to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with her. She proves over and over that she is lost and has no affiliation with the creator of this universe, except by creation.
Oh, she looked fabulous didn’t she!
He should have said I don’t remember more than 50 times like Ronald Reagan did when questioned about trading arms with Iran ;0)
Update: Well, I watched Oprah today. I was glad to see she apologized to everyone. She has been embarrased and was a little angry I thought. But at least she apologized.
As for Mr. Frey he seemed a little pitiful. He had difficulty being honest and it looked to me like he had difficulty even being honest with himself. And to think this man was held up as an example of “recovery”. Im quite sure his book hasnt really helped anyone. It was graphic and horriffic in its fabricated details but he evidenced little understanding about addiction.
I was glad to see Oprah pinned him down on the fabrication about the root canals. He squirmed and didnt want to admit it but she finally got him to fess up it didnt happen or at least he wasnt sure. As I said in previous posts Ive been in those drug treatment programs and I never heard of anybody being denied novocain for dental care.
Oprah says her pick of the novel/memoir “Night” was just a coincidence. Thats a little hard to swallow. It seemed to me it was spin and damage control. It was like saying, “See no big deal lots of memoirs are fictionalized”. However, she insists that isnt so. Its suspicious but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.
After my memoir is published I’ll send it to her along with my rap sheet. Who knows maybe I can get picked for her book club. She should be looking for one that is true and verifiable now.
Anyway, she did the right thing even if she was a little angry.
And, yes, Oprah. Truth matters.
At the end of the show the question was asked:
“How much value does contemporary culture place on truth?”
Very little Oprah. We have a whole society that buys into the lie that addiction is a “disease”. Thats how dishonest this society is.
Ted Wegener
Christian Recovery
http://www.christianrecovery.blogspot.com
I don’t know why people are bagging on Oprah, she was duped and she didn’t know it and like most of us would, she refused to acknowledge it. I am happy Oprah came out swinging at this Frey character.
I’ve read excerpts of A Million Little Pieces and fictional licence is fairly evident. However, I do think Frey is being lambasted rather unfairly.
Virtually every non-fictional account of lives and times, especially when told in the manner chosen by Mr Frey contains at very least embellishments. The true test is whether the writing works or not. I would be more concerned about issues of veracity when reviewing a manufacturer’s blurb prior to purchasing a pricey product.
I’m Irish-Canadian so I read Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” with some interest. There were moments when I wondered about the probability of some passages, but the question “is this true or not?” never became so compelling that it got in the way of my appreciation.
The category “recovery memoir” would probably have provided leeway for some of the “sins” Frey is being accused of, but I gather he chose not to place his work in that context.
I think when Smoking Gun discovered there was no mug shot to be had, they sensed they had a story on their hands and went to town on it. Part of the motivation may have been the Oprah Winfrey endorsement, because obviously whistle blowers could be assured of nationwide attention, although I’m not suggesting for a moment that Smoking Gun would ever be so cynical … ahem.
A while ago I read a book that passes itself of as biography - “Meeting with Remarkable Men” by one G.I. Gurdjieff. In the course of this peculiar little book we are told that during his travels as an itinerant jack-of-all-trades, the young Gurdjieff trapped sparrows which he then painted and sold as exotics to the easily deceived. In time of course the paint wore away, but by then the young mountebank was many miles away with coin clinking in his pockets.
This struck me as a tall tale; an allegory of sorts. Did it matter to me whether or not the young Gurdjieff did in fact paint and sell sparrows? Well only if I am interested in the man and matters of his truthfulness come into my assessment of his character. Otherwise, my requirements are simple - a good story that hits the mark, and his book certainly did that.
So lacking much interest in Frey the man and not having any personal stake in the issues relating to addiction, I would tend to judge Frey’s book soley on its own merits.
What I’ve learned from the Frey fiasco, using my own personal history: I worked on a trawl boat out of Hatteras inlet in 12/75; we did indeed catch a white shark, and I removed the teeth and later gave them to my sister. Now over the years, the shark has grown, the boat has become a ship, and all this in my re-telling the tale. The only trouble is, my sister still has the teeth, and they are still the same size!
Too bad for OPHANED WINDFREAK
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