Duped: Thoughts On A Lie

I believed every word.

Every single word.

I trusted every paragraph, every nuance, every scene, every second of every minute of every one of almost five hundred pages and I was so touched, so moved, so impressed I recommended the book to someone with one of those “You’ve got to read this, you’ll love it”s I don’t put out there unless I mean them.

Like Oprah before me, I remove that recommendation.

Turns out “My Friend Leonard” is no friend of mine and I’d never have known if I hadn’t enjoyed it enough to Google the author, James Frey. Which led me to the Smoking Gun article, “The Man Who Conned Oprah”, a highly detailed piece of investigative journalism thoroughly and completely shooting down (no pun intended but I’m leaving it) pretty much everything he wrote in his first book, ‘A Million Tiny Pieces’ and by default, it’s sequel, the book I’d just finished. In a nutshell, virtually nothing recounted in this ‘nonfiction, memoir’ ever happened. To put it another way, the stuff that did happen would fit in a nutshell with space left over and never required five and certainly not nearly five hundred pages.

The Smoking Gun article brought me to a link to the Oprah show in 2006 where Oprah had Mr. Frey back as a guest, basically to thrash him on national television for lying to her (she’d recommended the book in her book club, and we all know what that means. The book sat on the New York Times Bestseller list for over three months), misleading her fans and casting aspersions by default on the credibility of her book club. Turns out the publishing house was forced into a class action lawsuit of over two million dollars, refunding money to people who’d purchased the book and felt ‘cheated’.

I try not to be completely black and white on things, but certain things I stand firmly on. Very near the top of that list is this: If it’s fiction, say so. If it’s a fictionalized memoir, it’s creative nonfiction and I’m fine with that if it’s labeled as such. If it’s just flat made up every step of the way, it should never be touted as a memoir and never say ‘nonfiction’ on the inside cover. This is because people trust those designations, they put some faith in their allocation, and that trust is placed because it makes it easy for them to know what they’re reading, and to find out that designation is a lie does not leave a good impression of the author in the reader’s mind.

It leaves merely a visual of the reader bashing the author over the head with the book, several times.

If you miss on the designation, or you’re just not sure, throw in a disclaimer. What’s one more paragraph? Something helpful, something along the lines of, “…parts of this story have been altered to protect the identities of it’s characters…”, or, “…I was kind of hungover when I wrote it so I’m not sure a lot of this stuff happened exactly as I said it did…”

From the Oprah site I pulled up a Vanity Fair article, this from 2008, two years after Oprah basically ruined the man. His agent fired him, his publisher fired him, his friends deserted him, and the press pulverized him and continues to do so to this day. The movie deal he had in the works was canned. Pretty rough stuff but at the time I read it, having just been moved, drawn in, and in awe of his ‘true’ story, I felt almost, and as sad as it is to admit this, vindicated (If it’s fiction, just say so. When nonfiction books start lying to you, there’s a problem).

Turns out he’s written another book, and more links, to reviews of that one. The LA Times slaughtered it, the NY Review of Books called it something along the lines of a duffle bag of dog doo, and the excerpt I read didn’t move me to anything but a desire to stop reading. Ironically, Mr. Frey commented that with this new book, he was ready to ‘show the world that I can write fiction’, yet it was some of the worst writing I’d ever read. The best ‘fiction’ came out of his keyboard when he was writing ‘the truth’.

Bizarre, and an experience I’ve never had with a book. I think this bothers me so much because I’ve been mislead and disappointed many times over by movies (I actually thought ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ was going to be worth seeing), television shows (I thought the Seinfeld spin-off with the ‘George’ character, was going to be funny), magazines (Self magazine recently proclaimed I would be ‘Hot by Saturday’ and no matter how much grapefruit juice I inflicted on myself I wasn’t even warm by Sunday and was still in the same dress size) and sales flyers (that’s sort of a given but I’m including it, anyway) . I put a tremendous amount of faith in books, possibly because I’ve done it my entire life and never had it turn on me.

Another new experience for me: I now own a book I don’t want. I put it back in the bookshelf because I’d finished it and that’s where books go once I finish them, unless I loan them out (and how can I loan this one out, knowing to do that is to encourage a lie, to say ‘here’s this great story, it’s non-fiction’ and knowing it’s not) and I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, either, but uneasy is a good start.

I really don’t want the book, yet I’ve never thrown a book away in my life, my dog doesn’t eat books (just eye glasses, especially those with higher end frames) and I can’t imagine donating the book anywhere because again, why pass on a deception.

So I’m stuck with it. I’m half tempted to return it to Quality Paperback Book Club as they’re the ones who sent it to me to begin with, but can’t do that because I would never have received it at all if I’d refused my Main Selections on time so basically it’s my fault, not theirs.

I’m truly bothered by this and had to get it out of my system. What makes it worse is this: It was truly one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve read in a very long time. The author claims he submitted it as fiction but the publisher, knowing memoirs were the ticket at the time, encouraged it to be published as such and actually rejected it unless that’s the form it took. The man wanted his book published, and you can’t fault him entirely for pursuing that. The $50,000 advance alone would have been a lot of temptation to resist.

It’s just that I enjoyed it so much, I wish he’d had a bit more patience and kept following his truth in the marketing of it, holding on for someone who would accept it as fiction. In the final irony, if that had been the case, it would have been loaned out by now, and not sitting on a bookshelf in my place (albeit on a lower shelf where I’m hoping the cat will swipe it to the floor and the dog – maybe if I cut back on her food for a bit and she gets hungry enough – will give paperback a chance).

So I’m stuck with it. Unless, of course, someone crosses my path someday who has an odd fondness for being entertained and blatantly lied to simultaneously, in which case they’re welcome to it.