Past Imperfect
Transcript
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, a website called The Smoking Gun charged author James Frey with inventing a few key events in his best-selling, Oprah Winfrey-endorsed 2003 memoir about drug addiction, alcoholism and treatment called A Million Little Pieces. And if that's the case, then Frey took millions of readers for a ride. Frey defended his book on the Larry King Show.
JAMES FREY: I mean, my side is that I wrote a memoir, you know. I, I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has. A memoir, the word literally means "my story." A memoir is a subjective retelling of events.
LARRY KING: But it is supposed to be factual events.
JAMES FREY: Umm - OVERTALK]
LARRY KING: I mean, the memoir is a form of biography.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Later, Larry King asks…
LARRY KING: Are you saying the essential truth of this book, you stand by 100 percent?
JAMES FREY: Absolutely. I mean, the book is about drug and alcohol addiction.
LARRY KING: Of which you were addicted to both.
JAMES FREY: Yeah. Nobody's disputing that I was a drug addict or an alcoholic. Nobody was disputing that I spent a significant period of time in a treatment center.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What was disputed was, for example, an account in Frey's book of his being arrested and jailed for felony DUI and possession of narcotics after running into a police car and fighting with the cops. The Smoking Gun frequently posts celebrity mug shots, but couldn't find one for Frey, and their investigation took off from there. On Larry King, Frey said that some of the website's research didn't add up, and charged its editors with posting parts of an off-the-record conversation he had with them. Andrew Goldberg, the website's managing editor, explained why they went looking for his mug shot in the first place.
ANDREW GOLDBERG: We got an e-mail after he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show. Somebody said, "Hey, we saw this guy on the show, me and my wife, and we thought, you know, he talks about being on crack, being drunk, driving into a police officer, the melee the followed, how he got beaten up and dragged down the station. We'd love to see what he really looked like at that moment."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ANDREW GOLDBERG: And we thought, you know, maybe we'll take care of it in a day or so. It should take us, the way we do documents, about half an hour max. So I started making some phone calls on it and came up with nothing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, it's been kind of shocking how huge this has been in the press. Do you think it's something that the media themselves are particularly interested in?
ANDREW GOLDBERG: The media cares because many of them have been lied to by this guy. He's done interviews all over the country. He's answered questions specifically about his time in jail. There was no time in jail. When we had the truth, when we had the facts, when we had the documents, which he doesn't refute that any of that is true, and we said, "We're going to put it on the site," he had his lawyer send us a letter. They've said that there's a lot of money tied up in books and movies here, and if you imply that my client's a liar or fabricated parts of his life, we're going to come after you for millions of dollars. So he tried to stifle the truth. There's one other quick point I want to make. James Frey went on Larry King and said that we published off-the-record conversations and he didn't know why we did it. What happened was, we had sent him a letter Saturday morning, after he had sent us a legal letter threatening to sue us, outlining a number of things he had said to us in off-the-record conversations. It was a private correspondence between us and him, quoting from those conversations. He decided to take that letter and post it on his website, things he had said to us off the record that we would have never been able to use in the story. He posted them on his personal website a day before we even did the story, and I think it's important that people understand why those became on the record.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Thank you very much.
ANDREW GOLDBERG: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Andrew Goldberg is the managing editor of thesmokinggun.com. Adam Kirsch is the book critic for the New York Sun. He says that once, young writers would get their start with first novels that were really thinly masked memoirs, but that these days, literary tyros often debut memoirs that are really just thinly-masked fiction.
ADAM KIRSCH: It definitely seems to be something that emerged in the '90s, maybe starting in the early '90s. You had books like Girl Interrupted, Prozac Nation, which were different from traditional memoirs in two ways. One is that instead of being the life of an older person looking back on what they'd accomplished, it was often written by a very young person around the same age as someone who might in the past have decided to write a first novel. The second was that it was stories not necessarily of accomplishment but of suffering or pathology, overcoming obstacles, often having to do with psychology, institutions, drugs, and all of those things play into the James Frey memoir.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And now that the memoir has become a profit center, then there's more pressure on it to sell, sell, sell.
ADAM KIRSCH: Definitely. And I think that in this particular case, he attempted to sell it to publishers - Frey and his agents - as a novel, and couldn't sell it. And when he started to market it as a memoir, that's when he got a publisher. I think he said that quite openly. So there's definitely an added charge when you think that what you're reading is something real.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Have you ever encountered the three memoirs of JT LeRoy?
ADAM KIRSCH: I haven't read JT LeRoy's books. I've only read about the whole ongoing JT LeRoy saga.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We haven't talked about JT LeRoy before. It seems to have broken at roughly the same [LAUGHS] time as the - [OVERTALK]
ADAM KIRSCH: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: - the current scandal. He published three books about life as a child prostitute and a drug abuser. The books were published around the world. He got a lot of celebrity friends and celebrity supporters. And now it was revealed that there is no JT LeRoy. This seems to be a distinctly post-modern kind of affair, which isn't really the same as James Frey's, which is probably a simple lie.
ADAM KIRSCH: That is actually sort of a brilliant hoax more than a garden-variety case of exaggeration, and was clearly the work of people who spotted a place in the market for this sort of book, which is, like the James Frey book, a book about pathology and the suffering of a young person overcoming hardship.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, there's an author that seems to have been on the non-fiction best-seller list throughout the entire third millennium by the name of Dave Pelzer. He's written a series of books - A Child Called It: One Child's Courage to Survive, and then several sequels, all about his sufferings as an abused child. Questions have been raised about those. I mean, doesn't anybody suffer for real any more?
ADAM KIRSCH: Well, they definitely do. The question is what kind of person is able to express their suffering convincingly in literary terms? There have been many cases like this - the Augusten Borroughs book, which was so popular, Running with Scissors, I think has also been questioned by people who are portrayed in it. The problem is that when you write any kind of narrative, the events of real life get shaped in a certain way. And the gray area comes when you are ostensibly writing a memoir but using the techniques of fiction because you want to tell a more effective story. That's clearly what James Frey did. The book that it reminds me most of is a Charles Bukowski novel. It's exactly the same sort of story about a tough but sensitive guy overcoming basically a bunch of idiots around him and proving himself better than everyone else. That's a very appealing story because everyone secretly likes to think of themselves that way. But - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bukowski wrote novels.
ADAM KIRSCH: Bukowski wrote novels. It was clear that the character was supposed to be him and had his experiences, but because it wasn't a formal claim of accuracy, he had license to do things that James Frey shouldn't have been able to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, though, even if you have license, if you call something a fictionalized memoir or you allow the buzz to continue to suggest that it is actually based on reality when it isn't, it can still hang you up in the end if you're found wrong. I think the principal and most tragic case of that may be Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird. You know, this is a story of a child who was separated from his family during the Holocaust and his travails. When it was determined decades later that it wasn't, many suggest it's what led to his suicide in 1991.
ADAM KIRSCH: Yes. And there was a recent case, which was even more bizarre, of a guy named Benjamin Wilkomirski - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.
ADAM KIRSCH: - who wrote a book called Fragments, which purported to be a very elaborate memoir of growing up in a concentration camp as a child, which it later turned out was completely fabricated. That wasn't his real name and he never had these experiences. It is, of course, very dishonest and unethical to claim someone else's story or to invent a story which isn't your own, and it becomes worse, I think, the more painful that story is, because you're arrogating to yourself the compassion that other people deserve. Now, James Frey clearly does deserve a lot of compassion. In fact, one thing that I've wondered is how he is responding to it personally, because clearly he's someone who's had a lot of emotional problems, and - [BOTH AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, he did dispatch a lawyer to The Smoking Gun.
ADAM KIRSCH: It's true. And he has executed a sort of clever PR strategy by going on Larry King and having his mother with him. But if you look at what he said on Larry King, he was continually talking about the essential truth of his book and saying this is book is essentially true, even if it's not true in every detail. That's exactly the claim that you make for a novel, that it is essentially true and, in fact, that you need to create some sorts of falsehood in order to tell a greater truth. That's what he did. The problem is that he didn't acknowledge that that's what he was doing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, Adam, thank you very much.
ADAM KIRSCH: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Adam Kirsch is the book critic for the New York Sun. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, a website called The Smoking Gun charged author James Frey with inventing a few key events in his best-selling, Oprah Winfrey-endorsed 2003 memoir about drug addiction, alcoholism and treatment called A Million Little Pieces. And if that's the case, then Frey took millions of readers for a ride. Frey defended his book on the Larry King Show.
JAMES FREY: I mean, my side is that I wrote a memoir, you know. I, I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has. A memoir, the word literally means "my story." A memoir is a subjective retelling of events.
LARRY KING: But it is supposed to be factual events.
JAMES FREY: Umm - OVERTALK]
LARRY KING: I mean, the memoir is a form of biography.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Later, Larry King asks…
LARRY KING: Are you saying the essential truth of this book, you stand by 100 percent?
JAMES FREY: Absolutely. I mean, the book is about drug and alcohol addiction.
LARRY KING: Of which you were addicted to both.
JAMES FREY: Yeah. Nobody's disputing that I was a drug addict or an alcoholic. Nobody was disputing that I spent a significant period of time in a treatment center.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What was disputed was, for example, an account in Frey's book of his being arrested and jailed for felony DUI and possession of narcotics after running into a police car and fighting with the cops. The Smoking Gun frequently posts celebrity mug shots, but couldn't find one for Frey, and their investigation took off from there. On Larry King, Frey said that some of the website's research didn't add up, and charged its editors with posting parts of an off-the-record conversation he had with them. Andrew Goldberg, the website's managing editor, explained why they went looking for his mug shot in the first place.
ANDREW GOLDBERG: We got an e-mail after he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show. Somebody said, "Hey, we saw this guy on the show, me and my wife, and we thought, you know, he talks about being on crack, being drunk, driving into a police officer, the melee the followed, how he got beaten up and dragged down the station. We'd love to see what he really looked like at that moment."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ANDREW GOLDBERG: And we thought, you know, maybe we'll take care of it in a day or so. It should take us, the way we do documents, about half an hour max. So I started making some phone calls on it and came up with nothing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, it's been kind of shocking how huge this has been in the press. Do you think it's something that the media themselves are particularly interested in?
ANDREW GOLDBERG: The media cares because many of them have been lied to by this guy. He's done interviews all over the country. He's answered questions specifically about his time in jail. There was no time in jail. When we had the truth, when we had the facts, when we had the documents, which he doesn't refute that any of that is true, and we said, "We're going to put it on the site," he had his lawyer send us a letter. They've said that there's a lot of money tied up in books and movies here, and if you imply that my client's a liar or fabricated parts of his life, we're going to come after you for millions of dollars. So he tried to stifle the truth. There's one other quick point I want to make. James Frey went on Larry King and said that we published off-the-record conversations and he didn't know why we did it. What happened was, we had sent him a letter Saturday morning, after he had sent us a legal letter threatening to sue us, outlining a number of things he had said to us in off-the-record conversations. It was a private correspondence between us and him, quoting from those conversations. He decided to take that letter and post it on his website, things he had said to us off the record that we would have never been able to use in the story. He posted them on his personal website a day before we even did the story, and I think it's important that people understand why those became on the record.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Thank you very much.
ANDREW GOLDBERG: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Andrew Goldberg is the managing editor of thesmokinggun.com. Adam Kirsch is the book critic for the New York Sun. He says that once, young writers would get their start with first novels that were really thinly masked memoirs, but that these days, literary tyros often debut memoirs that are really just thinly-masked fiction.
ADAM KIRSCH: It definitely seems to be something that emerged in the '90s, maybe starting in the early '90s. You had books like Girl Interrupted, Prozac Nation, which were different from traditional memoirs in two ways. One is that instead of being the life of an older person looking back on what they'd accomplished, it was often written by a very young person around the same age as someone who might in the past have decided to write a first novel. The second was that it was stories not necessarily of accomplishment but of suffering or pathology, overcoming obstacles, often having to do with psychology, institutions, drugs, and all of those things play into the James Frey memoir.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And now that the memoir has become a profit center, then there's more pressure on it to sell, sell, sell.
ADAM KIRSCH: Definitely. And I think that in this particular case, he attempted to sell it to publishers - Frey and his agents - as a novel, and couldn't sell it. And when he started to market it as a memoir, that's when he got a publisher. I think he said that quite openly. So there's definitely an added charge when you think that what you're reading is something real.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Have you ever encountered the three memoirs of JT LeRoy?
ADAM KIRSCH: I haven't read JT LeRoy's books. I've only read about the whole ongoing JT LeRoy saga.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We haven't talked about JT LeRoy before. It seems to have broken at roughly the same [LAUGHS] time as the - [OVERTALK]
ADAM KIRSCH: Yeah.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: - the current scandal. He published three books about life as a child prostitute and a drug abuser. The books were published around the world. He got a lot of celebrity friends and celebrity supporters. And now it was revealed that there is no JT LeRoy. This seems to be a distinctly post-modern kind of affair, which isn't really the same as James Frey's, which is probably a simple lie.
ADAM KIRSCH: That is actually sort of a brilliant hoax more than a garden-variety case of exaggeration, and was clearly the work of people who spotted a place in the market for this sort of book, which is, like the James Frey book, a book about pathology and the suffering of a young person overcoming hardship.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, there's an author that seems to have been on the non-fiction best-seller list throughout the entire third millennium by the name of Dave Pelzer. He's written a series of books - A Child Called It: One Child's Courage to Survive, and then several sequels, all about his sufferings as an abused child. Questions have been raised about those. I mean, doesn't anybody suffer for real any more?
ADAM KIRSCH: Well, they definitely do. The question is what kind of person is able to express their suffering convincingly in literary terms? There have been many cases like this - the Augusten Borroughs book, which was so popular, Running with Scissors, I think has also been questioned by people who are portrayed in it. The problem is that when you write any kind of narrative, the events of real life get shaped in a certain way. And the gray area comes when you are ostensibly writing a memoir but using the techniques of fiction because you want to tell a more effective story. That's clearly what James Frey did. The book that it reminds me most of is a Charles Bukowski novel. It's exactly the same sort of story about a tough but sensitive guy overcoming basically a bunch of idiots around him and proving himself better than everyone else. That's a very appealing story because everyone secretly likes to think of themselves that way. But - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bukowski wrote novels.
ADAM KIRSCH: Bukowski wrote novels. It was clear that the character was supposed to be him and had his experiences, but because it wasn't a formal claim of accuracy, he had license to do things that James Frey shouldn't have been able to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, though, even if you have license, if you call something a fictionalized memoir or you allow the buzz to continue to suggest that it is actually based on reality when it isn't, it can still hang you up in the end if you're found wrong. I think the principal and most tragic case of that may be Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird. You know, this is a story of a child who was separated from his family during the Holocaust and his travails. When it was determined decades later that it wasn't, many suggest it's what led to his suicide in 1991.
ADAM KIRSCH: Yes. And there was a recent case, which was even more bizarre, of a guy named Benjamin Wilkomirski - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.
ADAM KIRSCH: - who wrote a book called Fragments, which purported to be a very elaborate memoir of growing up in a concentration camp as a child, which it later turned out was completely fabricated. That wasn't his real name and he never had these experiences. It is, of course, very dishonest and unethical to claim someone else's story or to invent a story which isn't your own, and it becomes worse, I think, the more painful that story is, because you're arrogating to yourself the compassion that other people deserve. Now, James Frey clearly does deserve a lot of compassion. In fact, one thing that I've wondered is how he is responding to it personally, because clearly he's someone who's had a lot of emotional problems, and - [BOTH AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, he did dispatch a lawyer to The Smoking Gun.
ADAM KIRSCH: It's true. And he has executed a sort of clever PR strategy by going on Larry King and having his mother with him. But if you look at what he said on Larry King, he was continually talking about the essential truth of his book and saying this is book is essentially true, even if it's not true in every detail. That's exactly the claim that you make for a novel, that it is essentially true and, in fact, that you need to create some sorts of falsehood in order to tell a greater truth. That's what he did. The problem is that he didn't acknowledge that that's what he was doing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, Adam, thank you very much.
ADAM KIRSCH: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Adam Kirsch is the book critic for the New York Sun. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
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