Frey‘s Fudge

Feb. 8, 2006

“I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin.  I lift my hand to feel my face.  My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut.  I open them and I look around and I’m in the back of a plane and there’s no one near me.  I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.  I reach for the call button and I find it and I push it and I wait and thirty seconds later an Attendant arrives.
How can I help you?
Where am I going?
You don’t know?
No.
You’re going to Chicago, Sir.
How did I get here?”

Those are the opening lines of James Frey’s book, “A Million Little Pieces,” about a drug addict who hits rock bottom so hard that pebbles trickle from his ears.
Now that we know it’s a hoax, the first lines of Frey’s book sound like one of Mark Twain’s spoofs.  But when it first came out, Frey’s story had the ring of being so outrageous, it must be true.  A real page-turning, edge-of-your-seat must-read.  That’s just how “A Million Little Pieces” came across to a group of young women I met last summer who passed it around to all their friends (on Oprah‘s recommendation) and talked for hours about Frey’s gritty, cold turkey nightmare.
But now, Frey’s story has been blown to a million little pieces on “Oprah” and he’s the cold turkey.
Yet all of the fluff & feathers that have been scattered over the Frey scandal fail to mention that the publishing world coughs up a fake memoir of similar dimensions at least once a decade.
In the early ‘70s, for instance, author Clifford Irving convinced his publisher that he had interviewed billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.  When the bestselling book came out, no one even knew if Hughes was still alive because he was as nutty as squirrel turds.  He had locked himself away in a bacteria-free hotel room with strict orders to his staff not to reveal anything about himself, not even his existence.
But the truth wiggled out somehow and Irving had a great fall on par with James Frey.  He even did time -- two-and-a-half years in prison -- and had to repay his publisher $765.000. 
Then there was Marlo Morgan’s 1991 bestseller, “Mutant Message Down Under,” about a middle-age white woman who decides on a whim to go on a three-month “walkabout” across hundreds of miles of the stark Australian outback with the Aborigines.  
Morgan claimed that the Aborigines had made her their “messenger” to the outside world to convey the spiritual hoodoo of the “Real People.”  And that deep in the deserts of central Australia, they had taught her how to leave her human body to take the form of supernatural critters, among other Aborigine secrets (ie, eating grubs and finding water in a place as dry as baking soda).
So a lot of readers were crushed to learn that Morgan had made it all up and the Aborigines were really P-O’ed about her phony journey.
“Is there nothing sacred? Do we not have anything left? I think it’s horrendous that she has gotten away with this,” said one tribal elder in an interview at the time. 
“Memoirs of a Geisha”?  Give author Arthur Golden credit: he labeled his you-go-girl memoir of the Far East as a novel and admitted to writing it in an apartment in New York.
Then there was journalist Stephen Glass who wrote a string of articles for the New Republic magazine that were sheer fiction.  His story is told in the DVD, “Shattered Glass“.
And who can forget Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her heartrending series about an eight-year-old drug addict.  Too bad it was pure faux. More recently, reporter Jayson Blair disgraced the New York Times with stories full of fake quotes and interviews.
These fake memoirs and false interviews are inexcusable because, as Oprah pointed out, recommending Frey’s book trashed her pledge to always speak the truth to her viewers. Where would we be if everything you read, saw or heard was a lie? 
Some defenders of Frey’s book claim that it still has value because there’s an “emotional truth” to what he wrote about recovery from addiction.
But that’s why we have novels, which are written to express emotions and predicaments that can’t be found in non-fiction.   
Sometimes, of course, writers are fooled by a source or find a story that’s so juicy they fool themselves into believing in it.
In 1982, for instance, I was working at the Birmingham-Bloomfield Eccentric newspaper when a family called to report the amazing story of a young refugee who had been saved by whales while fleeing Vietnam on a raft.
I interviewed the boy and he could barely speak English.  But with the help of his host family, we deduced after great effort that he was one of the Vietnamese boat people who fled their country after the communists took over in 1975.  Their raft started to fall apart in the South China Sea, and miraculously, some whales appeared and buoyed up the wreck until help could arrive from the U.S. Navy.
Well, what a sensational story!  But it began to fall apart when a reader called to note that the dorsal fins I described in the article could only belong to killer whales, which are never found in those waters. I thought that maybe I misunderstood the boy and they were the fluke fins of some other kind of whale.  And my editor said, well, if it isn’t true, it oughtta’ be.
Today, I realize that the idea of whales saving a sinking raft is preposterous. But the boy clearly believed it and as a green and gullible reporter in my 20s, I wanted to believe it too. What really happened? Danged if I know.
Maybe the truth about incredible stories is that if something sounds so outrageous that it simply must be true... it probably isn’t.
                             ***
By the way, if you’re looking for a great book to read, check out “Shantaram,” a thrilling novel of Bombay by Gregory David Roberts, soon to be a film starring Johnny Depp.
A former heroin addict and armed robber, Roberts was Australia’s “Most Wanted Man” before being convicted to 20 years at hard labor. He escaped  from a maximum security prison and fled to Bombay, India (now Mumbai) where he lived as a fugitive in the slums, launched a health clinic, and went to work as a criminal for the city’s mafia.  
“Shantaram” is Roberts‘ memoir, written as fiction in prison after he was recaptured.  The quality of his writing and the poetry of the thoughts expressed in the book are beyond excellent; each page burns with life, love and adventure as the hero strives for redemption.
Oprah, this is the book you‘re looking for.