James Frey. Over and over.
Guy de Rothschild in ‘The Whims of Fortune’
I couldn’t get past his turgid prose regarding how much he missed the estate. After the descriptions of pheasant hunting, I was unable to respect the man at all. Which is unfortunate because he had an interesting life. It might be interesting to see what he thought of his own involvement in World War II, and how he felt about the Nationalization of the Rothschild bank.
Has he written a memoir or any non-fiction?
Blasphemer! How dare you challenge the ex-cathedra opinion of Oprah?! (Yes, I know, she herself recanted— eventually— but that doesn’t mean you can challenge it unless you have her express permission.)
Unlike meeting him in person, where he has nowhere near enough style and wit to stop himself being absolutely unbearable, egotistical, self-righteous and always the smartest guy in the room.
Michael Crichton published one back in the seventies, I think it was, that left me with a bad taste in my mouth about reading any of his other works.
And David Brenner’s Soft Pretzels with Mustard I found self-serving, and ultimately boring.
I think the ultimate "biggest asshole in own memoir’ would be Piers Anthony’s Author’s Note in Letters to Jenny, a book of letters he sent to a young girl who was paralyzed after being hit by a drunk driver. It sounds terribly heartwarming until you get to the author’s note…where he mentions he’s only giving one-tenth of his profits off of the book to the girl who’s tragedy he’s milking for money and attention.
Maybe it was partially because I heard it instead of read it, but Kelsy Grammer’s So Far was the epitome of blowhardiness to me.
To be fair to Hemingway, he was worse in real life. In his memoir, he may come across as an ass. In his real life, he was a callous monster who cavorted with murderers and butchers for adventure and profit and sold out his friends for fame.
Mary Beth Whitehead’s book about the Baby M saga “A Mother’s Story,” is simply her own warped justification for what she did. If the facts don’t back her up, she excludes them.
I was dropped jaw when she spent two pages “justifying” her best friend lying in court, but didn’t even mention that her own father did the exact same thing. Why didn’t you defend Daddy?
My favorite line “Sara was Rick’s child because I was married to him when I conceived her.” Yet she was NOT married to Rick when she conceived their oldest child Ryan, and she WAS married to Rick when she conceived her first child by Dean Gould.
In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway tells the Fitzgerald “the rich are different from you and me” story, going on to suggest that Fitzgerald was crushed when he finally discovered that they weren’t some glittering, special race of people – just people with more money.
Of course, the main (dying) character in the story is a writer, so it seems thinly veiled autobiography. It’s too bad Hemingway was such an asshole; it’s impossible to read that story without hoping he’d hurry up and die.
The goatse guy.
He really opened himself up a lot.
Arthur Rubenstein, the great classical pianist who died a few years ago. I loved him onstage. At one performance, an older person I was with wanted to take me to the green room to meet him. We did so. His hands were thick and short and hot - really hot. He was as warm, charming - and handsome with his pure white hair and pink features - as an ideal Santa Claus. Then I read his autobio. What a cad. He used to feel up womens legs under the table at various functions, etc etc etc. His own self-description threw cold water on my fondness of him and even his performances - which I regret. I seldom read bios of people I admire as I am so tired of having it affect my appreciation of their particular talent.
After reading Ghost Rider, I came to the conclusion that Neil Peart is a self-absorbed elitist dick-head. I am really disapointed that I read that book.
Eh, I knew he was lying before Oprah promoted him. I’ve done work in addictions treatment, and his description is immediately and obviously fiction. Only a little poking around was required to discover that he’d first submitted the MS as a novel.
About ten years or so back, Ted Nugent wrote a memoir that I casually flipped through once. Don’t remember much about it, but I still recall perusing several random pages and thinking “what an asshole!”
The most bizarre passage I remember is a page where Nugent blasts the Grateful Dead as a bunch of old fart hippies (as if Nugent - in 1998 - was the up & coming, youthful cutting edge). Nugent brags about selling out 50,000 seat arenas in Texas and rants about how that must personally irritate the Grateful Dead members. Nugent doesn’t explain WHY he would think that the members of the Dead would care one way or the other that he could sell out stadiums in Texas. But he seemed absolutely certain that it MUST be the case.
I remember watching him on Larry King just after the scandal broke and his cry of jubilation when Oprah called in to say she still stood by her selection of the book for its motivational message and insight. Then about two or three days later she changed her mind and said basically “don’t know what I was thinking, that’s a veddy veddy bad man”.
Of course there’s also the JT Leroy scandal, a false memoir written by a real life asshole. I’ve yet to read Frey, but the Leroy one was the one that made me say “if this is true there need to be indictments and arrests and convictions” instead of friendships with various “damn don’t you look silly now” celebrities. For all intents and purposes refuted but not officially proven as a hoax is the similarly media evasive Anthony Godby Johnson, who was largely unmasked by Armistead Maupin (previously taken in).
I never had any problem believing Burroughs’ claims in Running With Scissors even though many disputed them and the family sued; they just seemed to “ring true”. (I know that’s not an allowable defense, but…). I’ve no doubt at all that he embellished but I think within reason that’s acceptable- maybe 8 people who have ever lived have a life sufficiently fascinating that it can be compelling reading with pure narration, but that 8 would be an outside number. While the Turcotte family sued and raised hell, their own statements seemed to serve as evidence, and then of course the fact that the doctor in question was arrested for weirdass things like stalking Bill Cosby, trying to enter Canada without identification and dressed in a Santa Claus costume, and lost his medical license due to a sex abuse allegation involving one of his middle aged patients and his teenaged daughter, and of all these only the latter was even mentioned in the book.
Piers Anthony has got to be close.
Do you count people who are just famous because of their own memoirs? Because Elizabeth Wurtzel has got to take the cake. It hurts me a little inside when I think about her grandparents coming to see her at Harvard, still, and I read that book years ago. See, even now it’s making me want to cry, how they were so “little” and “old” and she was such a cunt.
Without having read them- what I have heard others say- both Churchill and Bernard Montgomery believed that they never were fallible. This doesn’t make them assholes of course, but self promoters of the first order. Especially when they had no need to do so- what they achieved stands alone.