Feature:

  The Fray over Frey:
  Revisiting A Million Little Pieces
  Katie Boyle

I am not going to take another shot at James Frey.  Whether his fabrications were an addict’s braggadocio or an opportunist’s fakery, presumably only he knows, and I’m not particularly interested either way.  Besides, anyone who has both fallen face-first from a fire escape and been castigated on national television has clearly had enough hard knocks for one lifetime, to say nothing of that root canal.  What does interest me is the way in which Frey’s A Million Little Pieces has become a byword for all that plagues contemporary America, if not Western Civilization in general.  Most of the criticism directed toward the book is well-deserved:  Frey’s untruths were unacceptable, his stonewalling when confronted about them shameful, and the book itself no Nabokov.  Yet Frey has become a whipping boy for all sorts of ills—aesthetic, moral, and political—and the book variously cited as an example of 1) the decadence of the modern memoir; 2) the moral rot of the publishing industry; 3) the pernicious influence of certain French philosophies; and 4) the fraught relationship of American politics and entertainment to reality, as the term is commonly understood.  I don’t believe that Frey is the Fourth Horseman of the collapse of American civilization, and so I would like to examine and qualify some of these claims.  However, I do think that the Frey fracas will have some lasting ramifications, for reasons that have not been as fully dissected in the press.

“One-downsmanship”

One recurring theme in Frey criticism is a lamentation of the present shoddy state of the memoir.  Writing in Time, Lev Grossman pithily chalks up the proliferation of terrible-childhood memoirs to “a reigning spirit of hotly contested one-downsmanship.” [1]  Kira Cochrane notes that “memoir can be an intrinsically exploitative genre,” and wonders at the “pornographic” interest in the abuse narrative.[2]  Benjamin Kunkel measures what he sees as the current credo of autobiography—“Suffering produces meaning.  Life is what happens to you, not what you do.  Victim and hero are one”—against the nineteenth-century idea, pioneered by Wordsworth, of the heroism of the individual’s struggle for self-determination, and finds our current crop of writers lacking:  “Contemporary memoirists have taught us mostly how to survive.  They haven’t begun to teach us how to live.”[3]   
 

The litany of recent titles like Smashed and Prozac Nation would seem to bear out these contentions.  However, we should remember that the classic sin-and-redemption memoirs—the ones that aim at Kunkel’s ideal of imparting a vision of the good life—don’t skimp on the sin.  Saint Augustine depicts Carthage as “a hissing cauldron of lust” where he “muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness.”[4]   Before Ben Franklin was diagramming his way to moral perfection, he was whoring his way though Philadelphia.[5]   And while it’s true that reading many of the current crop of terrible-childhood memoirs feels like rubber-necking at a car accident, Frey and others of his ilk have many readers who testify that they took comfort from such books, and to dismiss such a response due to aesthetic concerns smacks of elitism.  As Mary Karr tartly put it in her letter in response to Kunkel, “Who died and put Ben Kunkel in charge of what memoirists are supposed to do?”[6]  

Publishing and Journalism

Frey’s insistence that it was his publisher who decided to market the book as a memoir rather than as a novel has affixed a giant bull’s-eye on the publishing industry, and journalists have gleefully taken aim.  Samuel G. Freedman’s preachy title—“The predictable scandal:  the book world’s lack of devotion to truth runs much deeper than James Frey and the memoir”—is a pretty fair summary of the public reaction among journalists.  Freedman holds up the reaction of The New York Times to the Jayson Blair scandal—a prompt house-cleaning—as a shining example of institutional self-flagellation, in contrast to the “evasions and justifications” of Frey’s publishers.[7]    Citing the business model of the publishing industry as a corrupting influence, Freedman argues that in-house journalists keep their publications honest, because the “institution has a collective stake in the accuracy and rectitude of each individual.”  In publishing, the writer is a “contractor,” with a similarly “nomadic” editor; hence, there is no institutional responsibility, and “[h]eads will never roll in a publishing house for editorial lapses the way they roll when necessary in a newsroom.”  While this willingness to purge dishonest staff is admirable, it’s worth remembering that such punishment wouldn’t need to be meted out if the vaunted built-in safety nets were working as intended.  Sara Nelson, writing in Publishers Weekly, is happy to remind journalists that their profession has not escaped the taint of fraud, noting, “[Frey] didn’t write front-page newspaper profiles of people he’d never talked to, and he never claimed that Pieces was supposed to be All the President’s Men.”[8]

Decadent Literary Theory

In a widely quoted New York Times article, Michiko Kakutani blames postmodern literary theory for the sort of casual relationship to the truth that Freedman ascribes to the organizational structure of the publishing industry.  Kakutani blasts the “fashionably nihilistic view of the world, suggesting that all meaning is relative, all truth elusive” and the argument that “all statements about the past are expressions of power and…all truths are therefore political and contingent.”[9]   While I don’t pretend to full communion with Derrida and Foucault, both of whom I must assume she is targeting, this tirade seems more a caricature of postmodern theory than a reckoning with its flaws:  a straw man doesn’t put up much of a fight.  I hesitate to throw out a potentially useful tool for interpretation in an attempt to clean up theory’s occasional excesses.  For example, given his fascination with institutions and their routines and rules, Foucault might have made an interesting case study of Frey and his recovery.  He might make the argument that even as Frey tries to reject the “discipline” of the twelve steps and the no-fraternization rules of the treatment center to be some sort of Nietzschean Superman,[10]  the messages he hangs on the wall in front of his work space at home seem to suggest that he’s internalized another disciplinary system--the ethic of modern capitalism.[11]   In Joe Hagan’s New York Observer profile, Frey’s notes-to-self include “A page a day.  Anything less is unacceptable you punk-ass-bitch-motherfucker.  [sic] Anything less is unacceptable.”[12]    Wouldn’t this self-imposed production quota for this busy worker bee do industrious Ben Franklin proud?  Really, why should the state bother with those tiresome displays of its power, like locking people in jail, when it has so obviously trained even an Addict and a Criminal to discipline himself?

“Truthiness”

Kakutani, like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, uses the slippery relationship between Frey’s “essential truth”[13]  and prosaic, police-record truth as the epitome of a kind of willful national indifference to matters of, in Maureen Dowd’s phrase, “untruth and no consequences.”[14]    On the episode of Oprah’s show where Frey received his dressing-down, Frank Rich cited Pieces as “the tip of the iceberg” of a world where “truthiness,” (Stephen Colbert’s inspired coinage) is the guiding principle, where “anyone can sort of put out something that sort of looks true, smells a little bit like truth but in fact is in some way fictionalized”—to include phantom Iraqi WMDs, Enron’s illusory profits, and the patent absurdity of “reality” TV.[15]   All fair points, I’d say—and yet, maybe it’s not quite fair to equate some evasions and inventions in one’s memoirs to, say, some omissions and evasions in front of the United Nations.  And while I hesitate to excuse Frey’s deceptions, the consequences of his untruths did not include deaths or maimings, except of his reputation.  

Satisfaction Guaranteed?

To my mind, a lasting result of this scandal is an acknowledgment by many parties of the influence of presentation in the publishing industry:  if you can’t tell a book by its cover nowadays, you may have cause for legal action.[16]   When Nan Talese, Frey’s publisher, appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Oprah forcefully laid responsibility for a reader’s experience of a piece of writing at the feet of the publishing house, with its command of the work’s packaging and attendant marketing apparatus:  “[I]f you’re publishing it as a memoir, I think the publisher has a responsibility because as the consumer, the reader, I am trusting you.  I am trusting you, the publisher, to categorize this book whether as fiction or autobiographical or memoir.  I’m trusting you.”[17]   Although Mary Karr’s op-ed in the Times emphasizes the hard emotional labor entailed in accounting for one’s life, she makes short work of shelving what is produced, because the publisher tells you where it goes:  “[H]ere’s how readers know the difference [between fact and fiction]:  the label slapped on the jacket of the book.”[18]   Frey himself, much as he sneers in Hagan’s Observer profile at being “part of the literati,” has displayed a certain savvy about how a work’s packaging primes a reader for a certain experience. In an April 2003 interview with blogger Claire Zulkey, he answered a question as to how publishing with Talese would help the book avoid being known as a “recovery memoir”: “Nan is the premiere literary editor in our country…She doesn’t publish crap, and she doesn’t publish sappy, bullshit memoirs.  Having her name on my book gives it instant legitimacy.” [19] 

The ferocity of the public reaction to Frey’s unmasking might be due in part to this new consciousness of publishers’ power.  Most of the time, we forget that genre is not always self-evident, that someone has made a choice as to where Barnes and Noble stocks a book, until an event like l’affaire Frey reminds us that the publishing house has been holding all of the cards all along, that we cannot disentangle our perceptions of a book from its shelving and packaging.   Here again, a bit of that maligned postmodern French theory might be helpful:  Roland Barthes cleverly argues in S/Z that there is no such thing as an innocent first reading, as opposed to the artificial, critical re-reading once we know how the story ends; every text is an echo chamber of other texts, so we are always re-reading, even a book we’ve never seen before.  Barthes dissects a Balzac short story in exhaustive detail, demonstrating how the connotative power of words and scenes—what he dubs the “codes”—trip interpretive wires in our minds based on what we already know from reading other books.[20]   For Barthes, there is nothing innocent in a text, especially the details that seem like wallpaper in a book—the “anodyne data” of the off-handed mention of where the party in Balzac’s story is being held, for example.  What seems like a minor character “painted on the scenery” of the book is actually doing important work:  since the text is cluttered with apparently unimportant people and things, just like the real world, this clutter gives the text “the glow of reality.”[21]    I would submit that even an apparently innocuous decision such as what to “slap on the jacket of the book” is a powerful part of this web of associations:  shelving Frey next to Franklin generates much different associations than having him rub elbows with F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially when this is presented as the “natural” place for the book. 

In the arrangement Oprah articulates, we as readers have surrendered to the publishing houses the authority to shape how we perceive a work, even to the most basic epistemological level:  Did this really happen, or not?  In exchange, the publishing house is supposed to repay our trust by dealing squarely with us as readers. The frequent use of the word “betrayed” to describe people’s feelings toward the Frey fiasco stems from a sense that at best Doubleday did not hold up its end of the bargain, and at worst, knowingly sold us a bill of goods.  That Random House, Doubleday’s parent company, agreed to refund the purchase price of the book[22]  suggests that it recognized a mutiny in the offing and attempted to forestall it by acting as if books came with a warranty:  satisfaction, or your money back. 

If several class action suits filed against Random House/Doubleday for breach of contract have their way, the money-back guarantee may become a standard option. The suit filed in Seattle has garnered the most press, since it seeks to recoup not only the cost of the book, but also payment for the time spent reading it.[23]   Legal commentator Anita Ramasastry argues that the contractual misrepresentation claims may hold water, but notes that precedent would indicate that the attempt in the Seattle suit to seek payment for “wasted time” will likely fail, and gamely pokes holes in the legal reasoning—“How can the reader’s enjoyment derived from the writing, be separated from his or her enjoyment derived from the false belief that he or she was reading the truth?  And even if the two could be separated, isn’t false enjoyment still enjoyment?  And how is the lost time to be valued—given that it probably would have been spent reading a different book?”[24]   While Ramasastry ends her article on a cautionary note, implying that since books fall under the protections of the First Amendment, they may not fall as neatly into consumer-protection statutes as other “products” might, she sticks to the legalities of the matter and doesn’t take on the broader question posed by the suit’s premise, a question which would seem to present a new model of reading:  Should readers be able to sue because they feel cheated out of a promised experience?  Are books another commodity, as Marxist critics have argued, and if so, would the standard false-advertising rules apply to them, as they would to “lite” salad dressing?  How far would such readers' rights extend—could I sue Richard Russo’s publisher because I hated the ending of Empire Falls? 

Whatever the result of the Seattle suit, the mere fact of its filing suggests that we are entering a brave new world (I assume this phrase is no longer under copyright protection) of reader-writer-publisher relationships. Autobiographical accounts in the past were typically preceded by an apologetic throat-clearing excusing the writer’s vanity in trespassing upon the reader’s time and making modest claims as to the value of the work (as Olaudah Equiano does in his Interesting Narrative), or exculpatory letters from a third party (like Benjamin Vaughan’s letters pleading for the second installment of Franklin’s Autobiography) begging the writer to go public, in order to demonstrate that the writer only reluctantly presumed upon the reader’s indulgence.  Modern memoirists typically do not feel obliged to include such prefatory material, as if the value of memoir as a genre were self-evident and no excuses needed to be made for the thrusting of one’s private life into the public sphere.  (Dave Eggers, with his baroque prefatory material and embarrassment over the cliché of writing a “kind of a memoir-y kind of thing,” is a notable exception.[25]) 

And yet, paradoxically, our brash modern memoirists, whose texts take for granted the presence of an interested audience, seem to have less authority over their readers than those older autobiographers, who felt compelled for the sake of good manners to trot out the dog-and-pony modesty show.  Instead of Delighting and Instructing a pliable audience, as the Horatian formulation assumed was the function of literature, writers are now viewed as party to a “contract” or “compact” with the reader, which sets the rules of exchange and balance of power.  Freedman quotes literature professor Maureen Corrigan as saying, “Autobiography is a genre that is defined solely by a handshake.  There’s no internal distinction between an autobiographical novel and an autobiography.  Rather, it’s the autobiographer’s pledge to try to tell the truth that makes the reader respond differently…And when this quaint contract turns out to be a con, we feel like rubes.”  Freedman goes on to argue that “Fiction and nonfiction make fundamentally different compacts with a reader and are held to fundamentally different standards.  In return for the freedom to invent, fiction must reach a benchmark of psychological truth.  In return for the allegiance to factuality, nonfiction can present what may seem implausible and tell a reader, But that’s what really happened.”[26]   Karr also writes of the nonfiction “contract with the reader,” the terms of which are stark:  “[Y]ou don’t make stuff up.”[27]  

It’s hard to say whether this contractual model of reading, in the literal sense delineated by the lawsuits over Pieces, will take root.  Writers are silver-tongued creatures, and it’s hard to retain one’s readerly autonomy when seduced by their spells.  We may be so charmed with their delivery that we don’t much care about their omissions, elisions, or exaggerations, and hence they may be able to wriggle out of the provisions of these newfangled contracts with the reader. Whether their publishers will also may be another matter. 

As of the writing of this article, Pieces remained on the New York Times Bestseller list (in paperback), even with a new author’s mea culpa in front of the text.  Such enduring popularity in spite of the controversy suggests that the general reading public is not as concerned about a breach of the sacred reader-writer contract as writers themselves may be.  Cynical commentators have remarked that Frey’s royalty checks have been fat enough to cushion his fall from literary grace.  I’d like to think that the reading public has profited from the experience as well:  if we can’t avoid being manipulated by the book industry, at least we can be savvy consumers, if consumers we must be.  If nothing else, maybe we’ve learned to keep the receipt, just in case.

Notes