Why do I always feel like I come to these debates just a little bit too late? Is there anything left to say about this topic? If I defend James Frey am I just leaping to the opposite side of the popular opinion and if I trash him am I simply following the herd? I don't know.
That's not all I don't know. I also don't know what to think about Mr. James Frey and his burgeoning literary empire which may or may not have been based on a foundation of lies and manipulation. I don't know if his book is true, false, or somewhere in between and sadly I never will.
I read A Million Little Pieces over the course of the last week and was riveted. The story is gripping, horrifying, emotional, and exhausting. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last month AMLP (as it has become known in literary discussions all over the internet) is James Frey's allegedly factual account of six weeks spent in an exclusive rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. He comes to the clinic after waking up on a commercial flight covered in various bodily fluids and missing four teeth. After detoxification (and a frightening dental experience) he enters a "treatment" program that he wildly disregards and spurns until ultimately he recovers from his addictions through sheer force of will. At the end of the story he goes to a bar, orders a pint glass filled to the brim with liquor, stares at it and argues with his personalized inner demon known as "The Fury" and then orders it thrown down the drain. Victory! In a presumed (by the fact that he said so) epilogue he heads to Ohio to serve three to six months in prison for a crack and alcohol induced melee that took place while he was in college.
If you read the book and believed it to be true you were unable to put it down. Yes, it is horribly written in a repetitive and overly detailed style which lacks flow and punctuation. But it is written in such a personalized way that it cuts through its own stylistic shortcomings and hits a nerve within readers (at least this one). It's almost as though you are reading the inner monologue of someone whose psyche is so twisted that you would wish for a comatose existence rather than trade places with it.
When he describes having a double root canal surgery without the aid of any anethesia or pain killers it's as cringe inducing as a piece of literature can be, because you can't imagine someone actually going through it.
But what if he didn't?
Apparently Mr. Frey was a little bit liberal with his depictions of his criminal past. In a detailed report by the SmokingGun they reveal major discrepencies in his claims, including basic facts that indicate he was never incarcerated and that all of his legal run-ins were nothing more than traffic related incidents involving intoxication. After the report and the considerable backlash that came with it Frey admitted that he made up some of his legal accounts, but maintains that the rest of the book is true. Others, like Frey's biggest detractor to date JamesDolan, an expatriate literary critic who seems to HATE AMLP and its author with an unreasonable amount of scorn, suggest that Frey's lies regarding his legal troubles more than likely point to large portions of the book being fiction. Dolan's claim is based mostly on his own feeling that the story cleans up too nicely and is too succinctly Hollywood. That will never be proven.
Oprah Winfrey, who launched Frey's book to national acclaim by giving it her "Mid-western Woman Seal of Approval" (a.k.a. putting it in her book club) has stood by the author despite the allegations of faslehoods within the memoir. She even called in to Larry King while he was interviewing Frey regarding the scandal and said that the book still "resonates" for her.
AMLP has been widely credited as an inspirational work for those struggling with addictions and the trials of staying sober. It has been particularly influential to those who have failed to find sobriety with the 12 Steps and Alcoholics Anonymous, as Frey strongly rejects the cultist (and other) aspects of the program throughout his book and instead credits his recovery to sheer strength of will.
So here we are, like I said before, with those who are offended by the fact that Frey would present his work as a memoir and then include embellished or outright false information on one side, led by Dolan; and on the other side we have Oprah, the fans, the addicts, and those who find Frey's tale entertaining and valuable regardless. And in between is the lowly B-Slant, neither literary critic nor drug addict. What's a normal guy to think?
When I first heard that AMLP was at least in part fake my first thought was, "Who cares, it's still a pretty good read." From what I had heard it was just the legal stuff that was being called into question and that there is no doubt that he was profoundly addicted to the worst substances on the planet and that the overall message of the book was untarnished. Then I read the Smoking Gun piece that outlines not only Frey's legal inconsitencies but another terribly bothersome incident that if falsified and untrue is downright wrong. At several times throughout the narrative Frey speaks to a dead girl who allegedly befriended him when he first moved to the upper-middle class "hellhole" (his word) in Michigan where his life began to slowly come unglued. He claims that at the age of 12 on the night that the girl was killed she used a movie date with him in order to get out of the house and away from her parents so she could go on a date with an older boy. Subsequently the girl was killed in a car crash as the boy tried to beat a train across some tracks after spending time at a parking area drinking beer, the driver was uninjured. In the aftermath Frey was held responsible by the town that never accepted him, and was even questioned by police in the incident.
According to the Smoking Gun none of that ever happened. There was a car crash in the town that Frey went to high school in but the girls in question (yes there were two) were both 17, not 12 and the driver was critically injured though he did survive. According to the police officers invovled they never questioned Frey about the incident and none of them recognized his name. The Smoking Gun was unable to find any other train accidents involving cars and teenage girls in that vicinity that matched Frey's descrpition of events. Also the parents of the girl Frey claimed to have a relationship with were unable to verify that the two were friends, although they could not say for certain that they were not.
IF what the Smoking Gun is claiming is true then Frey has lost all credibility with me. Not only did he embellish his criminal exploits for dramatic effect but he wrote himself into a tragic tale in which he had no involvement and used it to make his story more compelling. That is morally wrong, commercially manipulative, and devoid of all sensitivity to the families involved. But since I don't know for sure if he did that I'll pass over my harshest judgements for the moment.
Here's the point, he definitely lied about his legal record to make his story more dramatic. His legal record is the only aspect of his story that would leave an obvious paper trail. This sets off alarm bells in my head. We can prove that part of the story is false and he can't prove that any of the rest of it is true so why are we supposed to believe that his only duplicitous storytelling took place in the sections most conveniently disproven? The majority of his friends from inside the clinic are said to be dead in the post-script and none have come forward to defend his claims. If he formed life long bonds over mutal healing inside this clinic (which he does claim over and over again) why have none of his counterparts come to his rescue and said, "Yeah that's pretty much how I remember it." Where are they? They can't all be dead, if they actually existed.
I can't help myself, I have to assume that much of what I presumed to be real in the story is false, and until he proves beyond his word (which isn't worth much right now) that he was telling the truth that's how I'm going to look at it. Having been an epic liar myself it seems unlikely to me that only one segment of the story would be dramatized for effect. Once you get rolling on the lies it becomes difficult to stop and in all likelihood the millions of us who were entraptured by AMLP were taken in by a fictional tale based loosely on fact.
Now the question is does it matter? Surely something is lost when we realize that he was duping us all along, but is this emotional roller coaster totally devoid of value now that it's been proven to be partially fictionalized? I don't think you can say that. I really like the James Frey that exists in AMLP. He is strong and willful and makes no excuses for his mistakes. He looks at addicton and says that it's a choice, which I agree with, and he says that he is no longer going to make the wrong choice. He doesn't rely on books, or support groups, or anyone named Bill W. to heal him, he heals himself. Too bad that James Frey probably doesn't exist because he would be a great role model to addicts everywhere who fail to find salvation in a higher power and circle jerks. Is that inspirational character stripped of his message now that we have discovered that he exists only on paper? Maybe. It certainly is much harder to think, "Hey, he did it, so can I," in regards to a fictional character than it is to feel a kinship with someone you can literally see and hear.
The saddest and most troubling part of this scandal is that all of the good that has come from this tale may be erradicated because we will never fully trust the "facts". If Frey was actually addicted to crack, cocaine, alcohol, glue, and gasoline and he actually did wake up on an airplane missing four teeth, and he actually did have a double root canal with no anesthesia then the story still has merit. If he lied about being the toughest guy to hit the "Unit" since Leonard the gangster so what? What are we learning from this story, how to use an Adam's apple pressure point or how to beat addiction? If he lied about finding love in rehab despite all the rules that forbade it should we hang him for it? He tried to make his book more palatable to conservative women.
The problem down the line will be that we will never be able to separate fact from fiction in Frey's tale. He will never come out and say that points A, B, and C are true but points D, E, F are false. If he did that he might lose some readers to the initial backlash but if the fundamental rehabilitation story is accurate and his own inner demons actually existed then the peripheral story filler does not rob AMLP of value entirely, especially to those who have found help with their own addictions within its pages. We as readers need to know that the meat of the story is true. If it's not then throw the book away. It's horrific "inner monologue" writing style can only be tolerated if the monologue is at its base true. But since we'll never know for sure we can only read it and accept it for what it is, a questionable piece of literature whose ultimate value will be mired in questions to which we will never have answers.
And oh yeah, if he lied about that train accident, send Frey on the slow boat to hell because he's lost me.
No comments:
Post a Comment