Friction

ruthiness is the quality by which a person purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination. The term was coined and popularized by Stephen Colbert after he used it during the first episode of his satirical television program The Colbert Report.

A Million Little Pieces is a fictionalized memoir by James Frey. It tells the story of a 23-year-old alcoholic and drug abuser and how he copes with rehabilitation in a Twelve Steps-oriented treatment centre.

Released to wide acclaim in April 2003, the book has garnered recent international attention due to accusations of plagiarism or otherwise outright fabrication. It was thought the events in the memoir were completely true.

To date we have learned:

The Minneapolis Star Tribune had questioned Frey's claims as early as 2003. Frey responded then by saying, "I've never denied I've altered small details."

On January 8, 2006, The Smoking Gun published on its website the article "A Million Little Lies," about what they allege are gross fabrications in Frey's account of his experiences, life and criminal record.

On January 13, 2006, Steven Levitt, co-author of the book Freakonomics, stated in his website blog that, having searched the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database of mortality detail records, he was unable to identify a single death that reasonably closely matched Frey's description of the circumstances of the death of "Lilly", Frey's alleged girlfriend in the book.

On January 27, 2006, in the Moscow-based alternative newspaper the eXile, essayist John Dolan levied charges of plagiarism against Frey, accusing him of lifting material from Another Day in Paradise and Steel Toes, both written by the late drug-addict/author Eddie Little. Neither Frey, nor his publisher Random House, have addressed the allegations of plagiarism.

On January 26, 2006, Frey once again appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and admitted that the same "demons" that had made him turn to alcohol and drugs had also driven him to fabricate crucial portions of his "memoir"; it first having been shopped as a fiction novel but declined by many, including Random House itself. Winfrey told Frey that she felt "really duped" but that, "more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers." She also apologized for her previous telephoned statement to Larry King Live - when Frey appeared on that show January 11, 2006 - that what mattered was not the truth of Frey's book, but its value as a therapeutic tool for addicts. She said, "I left the impression that the truth is not important."

On January 27, 2006, Random House issued a statement regarding the controversy. It noted that future editions of the book would contain notes from both the publisher and Frey on the text, as well as prominent notations on the cover and on their website about the additions. It also noted that future printings of the book would be delayed until these changes were made, and these additions were also being sent out promptly to booksellers for inclusion in previously shipped copies of the book.

On February 1, 2006, Random House published Frey's note to the reader which will be included in future editions of the book. In the note, Frey apologized for fabricating portions of his book and for having made himself seem "tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am." He added, "People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal. . . . My mistake . . . is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience." Frey admitted that he had literary reasons for his fabrications, as well: "I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require." Nevertheless, he defended the right of memoirists to draw upon their memories, not simply upon documented facts, in creating their memoirs

The Chicago Tribune recently published an editorial in its January 16th issue entitled "The Truthiness Hurts", crediting the rise of "truthiness" as serendipitously providing an apt description of the Oprah Book Club controversy over James Frey's semi-fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces. In it, the Tribune said,

"Just as a media uproar erupts over fabrications in James Frey's best-selling memoir about his drug habit, along comes a new word that fits the situation perfectly.

"Truthiness is the invention of Stephen Colbert, host of the nightly Colbert Report on Comedy Central."

"...All of that is irrelevant, Frey protests, because it is the essence of the story that matters. In other words, the truthiness.

"The buzz certainly hasn't hurt sales of Frey's second book... Let the buyer beware. Like Frey's first book, this one has a ring of truthiness about it. Not to be confused with the truth."

Why am I talking about this? Because I'm writing a memoir. Or a fictional tale. I'm not quite sure anymore.

The truth is that the story that I am writing did occur, in some shape or form, to me in the summer of 1996. The people involved are real people. The major events that shape the story did happen. The conversations did take place.

The truthiness of the story is that no one documents every word said to him or her. That there were too many people that summer to keep track of, so it would make sense to consolidate characters. That much of the angst that drives the tale wasn't truly vented until later, but needed to be addressed to fit the context of the story.

Now what Frey did appalls me, not because he used creative license for dramatic affect, but because there is documents that prove he attempted to sell this as fiction and was convinced by an agent to pass it off as memoir to increase the price of the sale. But the fact is that he is correct in how difficult it is to walk the line between fact and fiction. Even the most amazing of true stories would suffer without dramatic effect.

But at what cost to integrity?

A writer's words are his tools and if his audience cannot trust his words and his motivations behind them than he is no better than a carpenter with broken hammer.

If I did have a hammer, I'd want it to work. I have my words and my honor and I pray that together I can do this new story justice.

So to abide by the new rules of memoir and truthiness, I now change the scope and context of my tale. A tale that is now 'based on a true story.' A tale that is not a memoir in the pre-Frey sense.

But my tale it too intensely personal for me to consider it simply based on my life, even if all the details are not fact. It is not fiction to me. It is not real according to the new rules.

Too personal and painful to be straight fiction. Not real enough to be memoir. It's a combination of both. It's what happens when you mash up both concepts real hard.

It's Friction.

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I couldn't put life into better perspective than David Zinger.