More people weighing in on the controversy surrounding "A Million Little Pieces." In the publishing world,there seems to be a backlash against the backlash, with people like Sara Nelson at Publishers Weekly insisting all sorts of memoirs tweak events for dramatic purposes, change some details and even, god forbid embellish.
That's not what James Frey did. He lied. If someone writes a memoir about running a whorehouse out of their suburban home for 20 years till the Feds busted him and it turns out they're a retired schoolteacher who once went to a whorehouse, people would feel cheated. If we found out Frank McCourt of Angela's Ashes wasn't dirt poor with a mother who slept with the landlord when they couldn't pay the rent -- if we found out that actually he grew up comfortably middle class, people would be furious and rightly so.
James Frey claimed to have a notorious life filled with multiple arrests, drug dealing that caught the eye of investigators and used a titantic brawl with cops that led to three months in jail as a central, recurring image. None of it happened. That isn't embelishing. That's lying.
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