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Surely we're well past the point, as a reading public, where the words "a memoir" or indeed "based on a true story" indicate anything but a slight frisson of "extra believability juice" added to the entirely fictional mix inside the covers of a novel.
Here's a hint: factual books provide footnotes listing articles, papers, other books. Factual books exist in a very specific and carefully guarded world of review and peer criticism. Factual books, with rare exceptions, don't read like novelised movie scripts and become bestsellers.
James Frey, like all those before him to fall foul of the idiotic "but you said it was true!!!" brigade wrote a NOVEL. Novels are fiction.
The fact that the author claims to have "lived the story" described on the pages of any novel is simply another marketing twist, as any intelligent person who as ever seen Frey live (or even just on Oprah) would immediately guess with no further evidence.
Frey is a novelist. Novelists make things up. I can't help wondering if not a small portion of the shame the gullible will now try to heap upon Frey is simply ire at being fooled by such transparent fiction.
