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Usually, yes, but not in the case of Frey's book. There is no disclaimer there, and he regularly announces that his book is completely "true." [etc.]
Thanks for answering my question. Not having read either Frey's books or the Smoking Gun takedown -- just secondhand accounts of both -- I apparently didn't grasp the depth of his deceptions.
But more than than, I think the judgment may boil down more to matters of tone and literary personality than actual truthfulness. Though I'm inclined to be drawn to narratives of addiction and recovery, there was something about the bits of Frey that I did read that made me inclined to dislike him personally, and avoid his book, if not necessarily mistrust his story. Some stench of self-aggrandizement and machismo, I guess. Whereas the LeRoy-Albert saga, however real or fictional, however assiduously promoted, does two things differently: creates a more sympathetic character, and -- more important -- plays artfully, and (we now know) self-consciously, with our notions of truth in various genres of writing, especially memoir and memoir-fiction and the thin line between them. So I tip my hat to adesoto, who unpacked rather well the point about there being "something disturbing about our seemingly collective desire for verisimilitude in the genre of memoir." Thanks too to Jesse for posting the link to the original Beachy New York article that unraveled it all. It does make fascinating reading.
A last point I can't help making: The vitriol that Ayelet Waldman manages to evoke in some Salon readers never ceases to astonish me. Don't know what it is, exactly. Myself, if I find something to be drivel, I just stop reading it and move on. Life's too short, and there's too much good reading to be done as it is.
