For anyone interested, I started a Great Debate (maybe it should have an an IMHO, but it’s a tough call) about this:
With Jon Lovitz (in his Tommy Flanagan the Pathological Liar persona) starring?
Actually, I enjoyed both his books tremendously. The lack of punctuation, etc. didn’t bother me, and I found the style generally likable, even reminiscent of Burroughs at times.
But I enjoyed TSG article all the same. 
Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
I think this is all funny as hell. It just proves once again that Oprah has the intellectual throw-weight of a badminton shuttlecock. The she-devil anti-christ of individual thinking has now foisted and promoted (at least) two frauds on the popular culture: this craven Frey schmuckatelli, and the oily, unctuous, public-humiliation specialist Dr. Phil.
Oh yea of little faith and puny brain, let thy eternity in hell be spent with Rush Limbaugh chattering in one ear and Oprah cackling in t’other.
She’s also the one who got gazillions of suburban housewives reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Anna Karenina.” Have you ever watched Oprah? I agree, Dr. Phil is the antichrist and launching him is a big negative on the Oprah scoreboard, but from my standpoint, the good things she does outweighs even Dr. Phil.
I’m hoping she addresses the Frey issue at some point. It’d be neat to see her go after him.
To be fair, she got gazillions of suburban housewives to buy the books. Who knows how many finished reading them. 
I wonder if maybe even his addiction didn’t run terribly deep. Might be that he had a few nights partying, culminating in the episode of falling down the fire escape and having his teeth knocked out. Then maybe that led to his parents insisting on rehab, which was so embarrassing to him, that’s when he started spinning the tales about looking death in the face and saying “Bring it on!” He might also have been, in reality, quite intimidated by the hardcases he met at Hazelden, which further inspired him to pretend he’d bonded with them instead. It’s a hard thing to admit that you’re a hardcore addict, but in a way, it’s also hard to admit that you’re a lightweight who bottomed out easily.
Years ago I posted a query somewhere on this board (?since disappeared) and a few others asking doctors whether there was any reason Frey wouldn’t have received local anesthetic at the dentist. The general reply was nope. I asked a colleague at Hazelden whether they forbid anesthetic for their patients. She rolled her eyes and said, “Been reading Frey’s book? No. That’s not true.”
As to the writing I had a meh response, but that usually doesn’t stop me fro finishing a book and enjoying it for what it is. It does bother me that he represented this as truth rather than fiction. It does bother me that the big revelation that was apparently intended to explain and justify everything was that a man made a move on him. I don’t care if he defended himself from an assault, but it all raises questions of flaming homophobia for me.
How remarkable, the Real Media bought his story hook, line and sinker. It took the Smoking Gun to determine it was a big lie. Further, it looks like it took them most of an afternoon to determine it was a big lie.
I suspect that the Real Media more and more are fighting a rear-guard action. They are under pressure to publish, they are under pressure to reduce costs. They seem to get it wrong more and more. The New Media is not ‘there’ yet, but you can see they are improving.
As another poster said, a remarkable piece of journalism.
That is an interesting theory. Years ago when I was working with addicts we had a couple of notable clients who were very similar in lots of ways. Both came from wealthy families and never had to resort to crime to feed their habits. Both were helped time and time again by their parents. Both were voluntary admissions apparently under threat of losing access to mum and dad’s money. Both had puny drug habits (using less heroin than many functioning social users) however both attempted to act the hardass in an apparent attempt to impress the other clients and staff. Kind of a well I failed at everything else but look how well I fucked up kind of thing.
So, not having read the book, it does seem from the TSG article that you could be right. It seems strange that he could be a hard case heavy drug user without having to resort to the usual crimes needed to fuel a habit. And no addict doing that for long stays out of the hands of the police.
Oprah is now defending Frey on Larry King. She says she doesn’t care if he’s a liar, she still loves it for the glurge. ::puke smiley::
You mean The Smoking Gun, the wholly owned subsidiary of Court TV, the cable channel owned primarily by Time Warner? :eek:
She actually used the word “glurge”?
Oprah talks about Frey’s book on Larry King Live, January 11.
Naw. She said “But the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me,” and “To me, it seems to be much ado about nothing.” In essence, yeah, the tune is “stand by your glurge.”
You’ve got to love Frey’s statement, though. He says “In every case, I did the best I could to recreate my life according to my memory of it.” He misremembered three months in jail and 14 arrests?
I haven’t been this shocked since I found out that Jayson Blair hadn’t really interviewed Jessica Lynch and Janet Cooke really didn’t know a little boy named Jimmy and Rigoberta Menchú’s family wasn’t really killed by the government and Stephen Glass didn’t really know any computer hackers and Whitley Streiber hadn’t really been abducted by aliens and Jennifer Toth didn’t really crawl around under New York City and Asa Earl Carter wasn’t really a Cherokee and Carlos Castaneda wasn’t really hanging out with Mexican sorcerers. I’m almost starting to get cynical.
No, Little Nemo, no! Say it ain’t so!
At least I can stay here, safe in my belief that Marlo Morgan really was taken on an Aborigineal walkabout, and that James Redfield truly did find an ancient Peruvian manuscript…
Doubleday is offering a full refund, so there must be some truth to it.
I don’t get the controversy. This guy shpped the book around to several publishers and went through several re-writes. He submitted it as fiction to some and non-fiction to others. I read both his books, while and found them hard to believe in spots, I thought they were quite powerful (AMP more so than MFL) and memorable. I recall thinking “how can a guy recall this detail when he was so wasted” and “how can a guy recall all this dialog 10 years later” when I was reading this, so anyone who bought into it verbatim is, IMHO somewhat gullible.
However, I agree that changing a few details to either make the story more or less sensational in places does not change the focus or impact of the book. I thought Frey spoke well and consistently last night, and appeared genuinely shaken by all of this…
I can’t stand Oprah and her book club, but was glad she stood by her pick and dismissed this quasi-controversy last night. The funniest and most telling part of the whole interview was that Larry King obviously had not read the book, which I suspect of the majority of those incensed by TSG’s article.