Tuesday, January 10, 2006

got some time on your hands?

I've never heard of this James Frey book "a million little pieces" but I'm learning today that it was the second best seller of last year behind the new harry potter. The Smoking Gun is debunking the fuck out of it. Very entertaining.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

a few days ago my downstairs neighbor gave me that book, telling me it was the greatest, fastest read, a compelling tale. i got about 70 pages in before i found the article you're linking to, and i am pissed! i had to endure (well written but) harrowing stories of getting your teeth drilled without anesthetic, fist fights, falling face first off of a fire escape, you name it, and now it turns out the fucker was a big liar.

Anonymous said...

This all on the heals of a story I heard on NPR yesterday about JT LeRoy. Apparently, it's the same deal...with a twist...he may be a she...and is passing their fiction off as non-fiction.
mario

Anonymous said...

I read it and enjoyed it; thinking like a dummy that it was all real. The airplane and dentist portion of the books did seem unreal, but I accepted that it was non-fiction. I probably would have enjoyed it as a fiction novel, but would not have developed such a connection to the material.

-HC

Stephen Glass said...

Ha! It's one thing to spin truths or punch up your resume of hard living to expropriate someone else's exploits from the safety of the next barstool, but a whole other can of somethin-somethin' to have your agent wrangle a huge advance for it all and start stumping up an down the media and get Oprah's army of the night under you sway.
I shouldn't be surprised; I was getting tired of hearing about that book, tired enough so that I was abandoning my idea of reading it, despite having intitially heard so many good notices.

beckler said...

I'm tripping that I had never heard of this huge cultural phenomenon.

On the subject, I'd like to go on the record and say that I fully expect a debunking of Augusten Burrows "running with scissors" sometime soon. There is NO WAY that shit is true.

werenotdeep said...

This kinda reminded me a bot of the The JT Leory business too, but the JT Leroy story, according to the skeptics, is a lot weirder and it's not so much somebody taking their experiences and inflating them in a huge way. JT Leroy is supposedly a ficticious person altogether, and who is played by one person in public, but the person writing the stories and giving the phone interviews is yet another person.

Stephen Glass said...

Bahaha! It's a debunkathon! With Burrows, I damn well should of known (again, open-minded me, it's something I dislike the idea of; i.e., the following of the author, without having read his work -- but I don't want to). What's with all these shady, sneaky, basically lying writing folk? It's an important thing for me to know, given that I myself am a discredited New Republic writer/editor who fooled tens of thousands and nearly sank the revered magazine into ruin.

Anonymous said...

becky,

Do you remember that the house where the "running with scissors" dude supposedly grew up is on the same street as Jake's house in Northampton? There's a tweaky banner hanging up that says, "Santa Claus lives here." It's really creepy. But, I guess who knows if all the stuff in the book is true anyway.

-michele

beckler said...

do you really look like a young darth vader? If so, why is your hair so oily? Is it the stress of sinking a revered magazine into ruins or do you overcondition?

DB said...

JT Leroy was credited as an Associate Producer on the Gus Van Sant film "Elephant". Was it the real Leroy, or the fake Leroy? Or is their a different JT Leroy who handles associate producing duties?

Anonymous said...

How about SLEEPERS? The author admitted that it is mostly made-up, but I still see it in the NONfiction section. A not-so-blatant-but-still-odious example would be In Cold Blood. Fucking marketers. Kind of leaves the hard-working writers (the ones who actually do the research) in a bind.

Don't even get me started on Jayson Blair, who parlayed his career as a liar into a book which actually tries to lay blame for his bullshit on his EMPLOYERS.

Ed

Stephen Glass said...

Oh, the stress of nearly torpedoing The New Republic, that nest of neocons, didn't faze me at all. You saw the movie; the rapist from "Boys Don't Cry" fired me and saved the day. It was a shame about Hank Azaria getting killed in Iraq, however. No matter; I went on to write a book and spent all the advance ... on conditioner, you say? No, on travelling the globe to meet with spirtual leaders to ruminate on my thesis that I SHOULDN'T ever conditon. And that was some scrtich well spent.

Anonymous said...

If you want to read the book it is a pretty easy read. You could read it in a couple of days if you are a fast reader.

HC

Unknown said...

i should have smelled that marketing ploy.

we got a couple of boxes of huge hardbound copies down at KDVS a few years ago.

nothing reeks more than sending a ton of books about drug use and hard times to a youth audienced independent radio station.

werenotdeep said...

I first got wind of the JT Leroy business from Niki's blog. She posted a link to a NY Times article that gives a long, but very in-depth examination of the JT Leroy business. http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/14718/

It pretty much convinced me that Leroy isn't a real person.

Anonymous said...

Here ye' Here ye'

Get yer refunds here

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/01/11/arts.frey.reut/index.html

-- Random House is offering refunds to readers who bought James Frey's drug and alcohol memoir "A Million Little Pieces" directly from the publisher, following accusations the author exaggerated his story.

Anonymous said...

Did you guys ever read that one book that everyone thought was non-fiction? You know, the one where the dude talks to his donkey, the other dude walks on water, and some lady magically gets knocked up without ever gittin' her freak on? And there's some old dude hanging out up in the clouds, ready to smite people? Man, I can't believe how many people fell for THAT shit.

(I guess this is the part where I sit back, and watch the fireworks?)

Anonymous said...

Whats the rivercats got to do with folk tales?

Anonymous said...

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/11/lkl.01.html

This is a transcript of JF defending himslef on Larry King Live


-HC