Thursday, January 12, 2006
An unintended byproduct of controversy
What's interesting about the recent controversy surrounding James Frey and his book A Million Little Pieces is that it's getting such widespread publicity that even more people will now want to read it, if for no other reason than out of curiosity. I know I'm curious.
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I didn't know about this literary news story until yesterday afternoon when I caught the last 20 minutes of Oprah. Crazy.
I am not so sure what I think about all this. It was definitely wrong for Frey to lie, saying everything in the book was true. It does, however, make a good story that obviously entertained people and made them think. Is there anything wrong with that? If the events themselves were not true, they did hold truths. The same thing goes for historical fiction. Parts of it are true and parts of it are not. I guess the main problem is that Frey lied about what was and was not true. Yeah, well, we all lie and exaggerate stories. What makes him so much worse than the rest of us?
Yeah, I don't know exactly what to think about all of it either. I don't know that I really like that it was all passed off as true, but I'm not sure just how wrong it is. If it's a memoir, and Merriam-Webster's definition includes "a narrative composed from personal experience," does that necessarily imply that the whole thing is personal experience? Or just that it's a narrative based on some personal experiences? This Frey issue came up briefly at a staff break recently, and an English prof made it sound like not that big of a deal: "It's been happening since [insert whatever book and year he named...I didn't take note, but it was a year long ago]." Hey, if a person I look to as a literary authority thinks it's not a big deal, who am I to disagree?
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