A Million Little Pieces James Frey

I'm not going to say I 'read' this book, when in reality there was at least as much skimming as reading, but who's asking? The reason I picked this book up in the first place was this article I think you sent me ages ago, Nik. I did some study on literary fraud as a student, and it's something I find pretty fascinating, especially when it comes to the strange, fact/fiction realm of biography. Pretending you, or your book, are something you're not is done, it seems to me, for one of two reasons: a) to denigrate the people you fraudulently represent, or b) to trade on their name/experience/situation and increase your sales. No, Helen Demidenko /Darvill/Dale or whatever it is you're calling yourself now - you do not do anyone any favours by representing them fraudulently.
So, in this article, when Frey said:

“Frankly, I don’t even care,” he says, exasperated. ... “I don’t care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book.It’s just a story. It’s just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I’ve broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it.”

I figured he fell into category b. I mean, I see his point - who cares? it's just a story - but I disagree. A Million Little Pieces is a good story, fact or fiction, but the writing is abominable. If I'd started this book, thinking it was true, and I was celebrating with this man, his journey through detox, I might be able to put aside the atrocious prose for the sake of the humanity of the whole thing. But if I'd struggled through the shit heap of unpunctuated garbage, thinking it was a memoir, only to discover it was just plain old bad writing, I would've been pissed too, Oprah.

The only reason you'd try to pass this off as memoir, you'd think, is to extract cash from bleeding heart redemption story lovers. And it worked - you were a bestseller - but your book is shit. I'm not saying your experience, whatever it might have been, wasn't an interesting story, but your book, James, was the badly written poetry of a stoned year 9 girl. I'll give you the Fury, young man! I can imagine the feeling of reading this thinking it was memoir and discovering later that, though the author may have, at one time, drank too much, the story was in fact, fiction, might have felt like the time I accidentally went to a Christian hip hop show: I knew I was going to see hip hop, but when, after the second track, there was no smacking up of bitches or pimping of rides, and it slowly dawned on my that I wasn't watching what I thought I was watching, I became outraged. Technically, it wasn't bad hip hop, but it wasn't what I wanted, or what I thought I'd be getting. I felt betrayed, and the only reason I can imagine they weren't explicit about the role their faith played in their music was so that fools like me would fork out for tickets, come, and possibly find my love of Hey Zeus. 'Fraid not.

Anyway, like I said: badly written, good story. And why does it matter? Because of a. Representing this book as a memoir denigrates people's real, lived experiences. The harm in letting people believe that stories like this are true when they aren't, is that this story misrepresents the experience of rehab, and makes real experiences look, unglossy, undignified, unexciting, unremarkable and dull. When in reality, I think I deserve a medal when I go a week without biting my nails. It's not glamourous, it's personal. People want to believe in redemptive stories like this (and why that is is another question altogether), and they are out there, but they're in The Big Issue, not in large advance book deals. And maybe it's too much to ask people to recover from this kind of thing, and then be honest, and eloquent, and media savvy, but then, maybe glorifying drug rehab is flawed in itself.