I spent most of my twenties in a fuzzy blear of booze, coke, meth, heroin and diazepams -- and for a time, it was a lot of fun, in a solipsitic way -- but having had the example of too many friends whose lives became, not tragic, but pathetic and ridiculous and tawdry in the course of their addictions, I got out. I'm only mentioning that because the experience has made me avoid sensationalistic addiction "memoirs" like Frey's. Frankly, America laps that shit up, addiction presented as an Afterschool Special for adults. Oooooooh -- root canals without anesthesia! Scary! Stir in a few gangsters, some prison rape, weeping upper middle class parents and a threadbare 7-year old chess prodigy from the projects and you've got yourself a new HBO series. I don't want to downplay the real tragedies that occur as a result of drugs and booze, but America seems to fixate on them while ignoring the far greater percentage of substance abusers in our midst who stagger on for decade upon blithery decade and rarely kick the bucket before being given up on by most of their friends and family. The reality of addiction is usually far too long and sad a process for the attention-span of the average reader or moviegoer, and it doesn't sell books or movie tickets.

That said, I love literary hoaxes. And I think the recent outing of Frey and Leroy says a great deal about the current zeitgeist. Well, perhaps "current" is an understatement -- you read American substance abuse memoirs going back as far as they were publishing them, and the majority favor mawkish reformist sensationalism over real objectivity. Seriously, what exactly is the insipidly naive strain in our culture that has us opt for the sentimental "I was lost but now am found" schtick again and again and again? Because people LOVE this stuff. On the surface it appears to be about redeeming one's life, but in actuality we are drawn to it because it allows us to IGNORE changing our lives for however long we can wallow in all the overexaggerated anti-bling and courtroom/prison/rehab melodrama. And by the time we're done, a sequel's been published or a new movie's been released. Makes you question just who is addicted to what?

So it makes a kind of sense if this is the arena in which contemporary literary hoaxes are occuring. After all, if someone faked the great lost Steinbeck novel, or miraculously "found" the manuscript for Bruno Schulz's "Messiah", would it make Oprah's list?

----

Though Frey claims not to have needed 12 Step programs, on one level his deception refers directly back to them: AA and NA meetings are NOTORIOUS for fostering blatant exaggerations. I've heard friends turn a single night of poorly-paced heroin snorting (and its vomitous morning-after) into months of squalid addiction replete with gangrenous trackmarks and Lovecraftian withdrawal hallucinations. Anyone who's ever been in NA knows that such exaggeration is "part of the culture", so to speak -- finding ourselves still alive, on the far side of substance abuse, with faulty memories, and barely a sense of how we got from there to here, it seems a completely natural step to exaggerate the depths you once sunk to. The community responds, they love it, everyone rolls their eyes and clucks their tongue, it's a fundamental part of the ritual (born-again religious klatsches are equally ornery in this regard) because it repeats a simple formula: exaggerate the sins of the past to reiterate the salvation of the present. In this way, everyone feels better -- and many feel competitive, thus creating lurid, down-and-out fodder for the next meeting.

Not that Frey is to be forgiven for presenting this schlock as memoir rather than fiction, but I'll bet the marketing savants at his publisher bear equal responsibility. As do all the people who bought the book and read it and took it too clearly (and literally) to heart.

I think Salon's readers have made it abundantly clear in recent months that WE ARE SICK OF AYELET. Her prose is mediocre, at best, and her weltanschauung is a loose patchwork of histrionics, solipsistic sentimentality and ill-considered opinions. The greater demographics for whom she speaks -- writers, women, mothers, Jews, and the citizens of Berkeley, CA -- are ultimately undermined and derogated by her inanity. She is one of the reasons I have started opting for Slate (et al) over Salon, and will likely not renew my Premium subscription next year. DEAR EDITORS OF SALON: THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN, AND THEY HAVE SAID: "ENOUGH AYELET, ALREADY!" She is horrible. She needs to grow up. So either find a way to get Mr. Chabon to start spanking her on a regular basis, or stop publishing her inspipid schlock.

First of all, I'd like to thank Zaynab D. for sharing his forthright perspective on the question that's had us all so baffled here in the West, e.g. "Why does the Muslim world seem so unable to take a joke?"

Then again, my fundamentalist relatives are equally on-the-defensive whenever someone dares to poke fun at their narrow Jesus-isms. I'm reminded of the long theological "did Jesus laugh" debate in Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" -- it seems completely absurd today, but one can imagine that in the early days of the Catholic church, such debates caused all manner of hissy fits, heart-palpitations (papaltations?) and burnings-at-the-stake.

It would be intersting to see if anyone has done an academic study on just how long it takes, on the average, for an organized religion to develop a sense of humor. 1500 years? 2000? Ever?

On another note: John McMahon -- you are completely, 100% WRONG about Islam having little or no tradition in the visual arts (and I specifically refer you to its brilliant history of illuminated manuscripts, as well as secular works like "the Perfumed Garden".) Next time, do your homework (or at least go to a few museums) before making sweeping generalizations about a culture spanning so many people and so many centuries -- you make us all look bad,