A Million Alleged Pieces ...

I stayed up way too late Sunday night and plowed through James Frey's bestseller, A Million Little Pieces.

Upon reflection - some of the neatly tied up plot twists and descriptions of drug use seem far fetched.

This contrarian review of the book raises a lot of good questions. For instance, why would a wealthy kid who could jet off to Paris at will resort to sniffing glue and gasoline. The author of the bad review alleges that Frey ripped a lot of the harder drug use details off of the late Eddie Little, author of Another Day in Paradise which was published when Frey was working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

When I read Augusten Burrough's memoirs - you could tell certain memories might have been spruced up a bit - but with Frey the assertions are so outstanding and formulaic that you question how much was really true.

That being said, it's a fun enough read as a thriller and I will probably read My Friend Leonard so I can follow the "story".

My wife points me to this 2003 article by Deborah Caulfield Rybak in the Minneapolois Star Tribune about the subject:

snip:

Hynes added dryly, "In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing."


Taking liberties;
Memoir writers walk a wavy line between reality and invention.

A word was missing from a quote by author Samuel Hynes. The text has been changed to say, 'You're not lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene.'

We read memoirs because they are about "real life" _ but are they? And if they are not, as some allege about parts of James Frey's recent bestselling memoir of addiction and life at a Minnesota rehab clinic, what are they?

The old saying used to be, "There are two sides to every story." But when it comes to memoirs it might be more appropriate to quote lyrics from musician Don Henley, who suggests three sides: "There's yours and there's mine and the cold hard truth."

Most of the reviews of Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" recounted his horrific descriptions of waking up bloody on an airplane and undergoing a root canal without painkillers. But experts contacted by the Star Tribune questioned whether those things could have happened as described.

Frey has been more amused than irritated by the allegations. "I wrote what was true to me and true to the experience," he said recently. "If people want to pick the facts apart, they can."

Other memoirists point to the cold hard truth of creating a good memoir: You need to write it like fiction, they say, which is where problems can arise.

In an era where questions are being asked about journalists' adherence to the truth, memoirists apparently aren't held to the same standard, although their books are found in nonfiction sections of bookstores.

Memoir-writing is different, acknowledged Sean McDonald, who edited Frey's book. "Its impact comes from the fact that it feels real because there's a person there that [the events] happened to," he said.

"So it has to be true . . . right?"

Whether memoirs are real or reality-challenged, there is no denying people are buying them.

"Memoirs and biographies are among the top five biggest trends in publishing," said Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising for Barnes & Noble (the others are political science, science, diet and health).

"It had been a soft season this year until all these memoirs like Queen Noor and Hillary Clinton came out," he said.

"A Million Little Pieces," published in April and already in its seventh printing, also helped. Frey's story of his extreme drug and alcohol abuse and subsequent stay in a Minnesota rehab clinic (read Hazelden) drew instant media attention. Although a few critics said that the former screenwriter's more dramatic recollections stretched credibility, most focused on Frey's unusual approach to rehab (he rejected the 12-step method favored by Alcoholics Anonymous) and his electrifying writing style.

Among the book's most-quoted paragraphs was its first: "I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin. I lift my hand to feel my face. My front four teeth are gone. I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. I open them and I look around and I'm in the back of a plane and there's no one near me. I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood."

Frey learns from a flight attendant that he was brought to the plane by a "doctor and two other men."

Frey's unblinking description of his long-term substance abuse (he ended up on the plane, he wrote, after a weeklong bender culminating in a face-first fall down a fire escape) put his first book on bestseller lists and landed him a movie deal with Brad Pitt.

Others, however, have a different attitude toward that opening paragraph.

"No way. No how. Nowhere," was Jon Austin's assessment of Frey's airplane experience. Austin, who served as spokesman for Northwest Airlines for 10 years, said "there's no way that flight attendants _ who are trained safety professionals _ would say 'Oh yeah, we'll accept responsibility for this incapacitated person who we would have to evacuate in case of an emergency.' "

Capt. Steve Luckey, retired Northwest Airlines 747 pilot and chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association's national security committee, was equally skeptical. "The only way someone would be on a plane in that condition would be on a stretcher and accompanied by a doctor," he said.

Frey's friend Keith Bray remembers the incident differently. Bray said in an interview that he and another friend took Frey to the hospital before they took him to the airport. "So he wasn't bleeding, and he wasn't unconscious, although he was in blackout and he was a mess," Bray said. "But my other friend is a very persuasive talker and got him on that plane."

Nan Talese, head of the prestigious Nan A. Talese imprint at Doubleday and publisher of "A Million Little Pieces," didn't find the discrepancies troubling.

"You have to remember when someone is writing in the first person, it is their memory as they recall it," she said in an interview. "And memory is very selective; there's no such thing as the whole story. If they took a lie-detector test it would probably be true, but if that person had a witness all the way through, maybe it didn't exactly happen that way. But that's how they see it."

Later in the book, Frey wrote about a visit to a dentist near the rehab clinic who told him that he needed two root canals and four caps. "This is going to be incredibly painful," the dentist told Frey, explaining that because Frey was a rehab patient, he would not be given any anesthesia.

"Absolutely false," said Dr. Scott Lingle, president of the Minnesota Dental Association. "No dentist would tell a patient that. I wouldn't give him a narcotic postoperatively, but Novocaine wouldn't affect an addiction."

Frey said that his rehab counselor had relapsed after a trip to the dentist and wanted to save Frey from a similar experience,

Another addiction memoir

Frey's isn't the only recent memoir to cover drug rehab in Minnesota. In "Dry," Augusten Burroughs wrote of his stay at the Eden Prairie location of the Pride Institute, a gay-oriented clinic (in the book, Burroughs called it the Proud Institute and placed it in Duluth). In a front-of-book disclaimer, Burroughs acknowledged changing names and some events.

"People ask if it is true, which it is," Burroughs said. "If you've told the truth, truth is the absolute defense." He added that his publisher's lawyers had "vetted it line-by-line," but only to search for potential lawsuits.

By contrast, although Frey freely acknowledged in interviews that he changed names and characteristics of his fellow rehab patients, his book contained no disclaimer page.

"It's a total slip-up that we didn't have a disclaimer page," Talese said. "I'm embarrassed."

Still, she acknowledged that, at most, attorneys reviewing the book wouldn't be as concerned about scenes where no one could be identified.

"Our lawyers are very, very careful," she explained, adding, "There's nothing libelous about removing one's teeth without Novocaine."

A vignette from Frey's book about crack addicts at a run-down bus depots might also be libel-proof, but that doesn't mean it's entirely factual, either. Minneapolis police officials doubted a lengthy passage in the book where Frey, looking for his girlfriend who has run away from the clinic, goes to the bus station looking for her.

Lt. Jeff Rugel worked narcotics in the part of downtown that encompasses the bus depot in the early 1990s, when Frey was in rehab. Rugel said the bus-depot scene "didn't ring true."

He said the discrepancies started with little things, such as descriptions of the depot's wooden benches and a filthy bathroom. "The place had dozens of those hard plastic chairs that were bolted to racks, and the bathroom, while not a place I'd want to eat lunch, was certainly never the absolute pit that he describes," Rugel said.

Frey wrote that he persuaded a crack dealer he found in the men's room who had seen his girlfriend to reveal her whereabouts.

Minneapolis police captain Mike Martin found that passage hard to believe: "The dealer wouldn't have been hanging out in the bathroom at the bus depot, but besides that, the dealer never would have talked with him."

In Frey's account, the dealer directed him to a vacant building, where he went on a room-to-room search, finding butane-torch-wielding crack smokers along the way.

"At the time, there weren't that many vacant big buildings downtown where you could even get away with that," Rugel said. He also was amused by the butane-torch description. "Butane torches are expensive and fragile, but I never saw those on the street. Nobody had those, especially no serious crack users; they were too hard to carry around. They used a lighter."

When asked about Rugel's comments, Frey acknowledged that he changed the location of the crack building, which he said was "half an hour" rather than "half a mile" from the bus depot. "I've never denied that I've altered small details. Is it relevant that the building wasn't right down the street? It's not relevant to me."

Walking close to fiction

To Samuel Hynes, author of the acclaimed memoir "The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War," about his childhood in South Minneapolis, such discrepancies are to be expected and are part of the memoir-writing process.

"When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing," said Hynes, an emeritus professor of literature at Princeton University. "You're not lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene.

Hynes added dryly, "In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing."

.

Deborah Caulfield Rybak is at dcrybak@startribune.com .