million lil' what?

turns out that the Oprah book club memoir "a million little pieces" is closer to a work of fiction than a memoir.

According to The Smoking Gun website:
Of course, if "A Million Little Pieces" was fictional, just some overheated stories of woe, heartache, and debauchery cooked up by a wannabe author, it probably would not get published. As it was, Frey's original manuscript was rejected by 17 publishers before being accepted by industry titan Nan Talese, who runs a respected boutique imprint at Doubleday (Talese reportedly paid Frey a $50,000 advance). According to a February 2003 New York Observer story by Joe Hagan, Frey originally tried to sell the book as a fictional work, but the Talese imprint "declined to publish it as such." A retooled manuscript, presumably with all the fake stuff excised, was published in April 2003 amid a major publicity campaign.  turns out that his alleged crime sprees were grossly exaggerated if not completely made up.



James Frey is in fact not such a bad guy as much as he'd like us to believe otherwise. so was this simply to sell books? perhaps. Memoirs are the genre of the day. Seems more likely to me that he was doing what boys and men do everyday, he was looking tough. To look at a photo of this man you'd think him to be a kind of nutty professor type, with a tweed sport coat and a pipe the more likely outfit than prison stripes. his look doesn't give much of a "bad ass" impression. perhaps this man wanted to say what all men want to say: "I'm tough, i can protect myself, and I'm so much more interesting than I look. Respect me." Last night i watched a show called "Raising Cain" about the disservice that our country had done to it's young boys. With the advent of school shootings and youth violence, we have gone from coddling our boys to fearing them. It seems to me that Frey has taken a normal teenage bravado of talking shit (although slightly misplaced on an adult his age) and made a fortune off of it calling it a memoir. I've never read the book, but i hear it's a good story. Sounds a little sensationalistic, but a page turner nonetheless. And although his posturing doesn't really bother me, his constant and consistent denial that anything in his book is less than true seems more intriguing to me. I'm sure he was a boozer, a user and a looser, but admitting he spent a few hours in jail instead of three months doesn't make his book any less interesting. Instead, it makes him less interesting. that's what this is really all about. I know I'm relatively new to this manhood thing, but i want to say that i think honesty is more important than how often you can swear and how many months you spent in jail. i wouldn't mind making "a million little dollars" i just wonder at what cost. my integrity is worth more than that. i think that's being a man.