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• Friday, January 27, 2006 08:19 AM

  Frey's demeanor

  I could not understand why he made little attempt to defend his work, his art. He let Oprah shit all over him with barely a peep. I can't imagine any author that Frey aspires to (Hemingway, for example) putting up with that sort of indignation. I don't know if it was because he felt that if he sat and took it he wouldn't offend the sheeple who would continue to buy his book? Or, he was too afraid of the wrath of Oprah? If he had any integrity at all, I thought he would have stood up for himself and his writing.

  I hear people say memoirs are full of hyperbole or embellishment. I agree. But, Frey dug a hole when in interview after interview he failed to present an articulate explanation of his own work. He could easily have said that he built this "badass" persona because he was so troubled and needed it to achieve recovery. Or he could have said that the book represents his emotional response to "his story" that it's not completely factual but represents the horror he felt inside and how bad he felt about himself. Instead he repeated the mantra that it was all true. Sure some names had been changed, but it was essentially true. In response to a question about whether the events in the book really happened, he said: "Yeah, it did. My girlfriend killed herself the way I wrote it". Nobody forced him to say that. We know now that was a lie. He made the bulk of his sales with the Oprah book club. And, his popularity was based on this "true story". The Oprah fan girls ate it up because they believed and Oprah believed in the story's authenticity.

  Depending upon who you believe, Nan Talese has made it pretty clear that that book was never presented to her as fiction. So, I don't see how it can be said that his publishers forced him to sell the book as a memoir. And, if he had any concerns about that, why did he continue to promote the myth of its truthfulness.

  As far as I'm concerned, none of these people deserve much sympathy. They all made a lot of money off of this book and given the collective short term memory of Americans, all will soon be forgotten and they will all be happily relaxing at their expensive summer homes (yes, James has one to) in a few months.

  —kgirl Read kgirl's other letters
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