James Frey, Pontius Pilate, Oprah and the Truth

One of the reasons that Pontius Pilate is one of my favorite characters in the Bible (besides the obvious) is that he asks one of the few questions worth asking: "What is truth?" (John 18:38).

That questions seems particularly apposite today when considering the controversy of James Frey and his book, A Million Little Pieces. The website The Smoking Gun has revealed that Frey may have invented or embellished certain aspects of his bestselling book, which, as the author himself has admitted, was originally pitched to publishers as a novel.

The author went on Larry King to defend himself and his book and Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen Frey's book for her hugely influential book club (which caused its sales to skyrocket) called King's show herself to defend Frey.

This is what she said:

"And I feel about A Million Little Pieces that although some of the facts have been questioned -- and people have a right to question, because we live in a country that lets you do that, that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me. And I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book and will continue to read this book."

In other words, the end justifies the means.

If people are helped by Frey's book, Oprah seems to be saying, it doesn't matter whether or not the book is true. This makes A Million Little Pieces sound like the literary equivalent of a placebo -- as long as the patient thinks it works, why mess with a good thing?

My feelings about the matter are a little more complex. First of all, memoirs are literary documents that are comprised of a mixture of fact, memory and, yes, invention. No memoir is 100% factual -- not even when you have a memory as tenacious as Jack Kerouac's (who published his memoirs as fiction). There's a story about Lucy Grealy, who wrote the memoir Autobiography of a Face, being stopped by a fan who asked her with amazement how she could remember all the dialogue from her childhood years that she reproduced so accurately in her book. "Easy," Grealy is said to have replied, "I made it up."

Memoirs, as Picasso once said of art in general, are lies that tell the truth. Anyone who doesn't know this is incurably naive. Frey's mistake was not in embellishing the facts to make a better story, but in embellishing parts of his story that could be checked against documents in the public record, like police reports.

Nevertheless, A Million Little Pieces will either stand or fall on its worth as a work of literature -- not on whether every word in it is factually accurate, and not on whether people are inspired to stop drinking and/or doing drugs because of it.

And by the way, I made up that Lucy Grealy quote.

Or did I?

Tom Moran

Note: 1/22/06: Okay, I know you're dying to find out whether I made up that quote. Well, I quoted it from memory so I was hedging a bit. But here's the Ann Patchett quote I got it from:

"I'm amazed by how you remember everything about your childhood so clearly," a woman said to Lucy one night when we were giving a reading together in New York.

"I didn't remember it," she said pointedly. "It's art. I made it up." She didn't mean it had never happened. She meant that capturing the past is a process much more complicated than accurate transcription.