Does anyone really care about all of this James Frey debacle? I mean, really? I've read the book (I read it last summer during my "memoir phase"), and it seems to me that people should be more upset about the fact that the writing in it is just really bad.
I'm currently watching the Oprah episode referenced in the above article, and it's really painful. Honestly, how many "memoirs" or biographies (that are interesting at all) aren't a little embellished? To me, the point of a memoir is still to tell a compelling story, and does it really fucking matter whether his girlfriend committed suicide by hanging or by wrist-slitting? The point still comes across, and ultimately the book is about drug and alcohol recovery, not about the tiny details. There is still much to be learned and gained from it.
Oprah is being a total hard-ass on this guy, and she's as much as admitted that she's really embarrassed about promoting and defending the book last week, but it seems to me that she's slightly scapegoating this guy. If she's going to go on Larry King Live and vehemently defend him and basically say the exact same thing I just said in the above paragraph, then when she's attacked by her audience, she should stand her ground, and not suddenly reverse position and invite him onto the show to more or less put him in shackles and let the whole audience throw rocks at him for an hour. It's cowardly and malicious, and, at least in my opinion, makes her look just as bad and fake as it makes him look. What a fucking bitch. And a fake.
I don't care if James Frey spent 3 years in jail, or 3 hours. That's not what I took away from the book, and maybe I'm being too lenient, but that's just how I see it. The bigger truth of the book is still the the Truth of his recovery. God, and she has all these journalists on the show like Joel Stein (nice career there!) and Maureen Dowd talking about how awful James Frey is and how Oprah should "kick his butt" and when Oprah admits she was wrong, she gets applauded. But when Frey says he wrote things as he "remembered them" (including with some documentation), he gets roundly booed and Oprah sits there smirking, taking it all in.
Big fucking deal. I think Frey is a pompous ass, and his book isn't even that good, but still, I feel a little sorry for him.
1 comment:
i mostly agree. i haven't read the book, and i have a hard time calling things "bad," even knowing the context, but i think most memoirs, were they to be written strictly as a chronology of experiences, would be terribly uninteresting. it seems to me that what makes books (or films, or tv shows) interesting isn't the sequence of "what happens" but the meaning the author or audience derive from them. so whgat if wasn't a literal anathesia-free root canal (and i really hope that's not true, in the factual sense). the notions of suffering for one's sins or transgressions (or addictions, they tend to offer myriad opportunites for degradation and punishment), or of the redemptive qualities of pain, aren't particularly new. a memoir, or biography, written without any kind of metaphor can't possibly be very interesting to many people. aside from making it less boring, the author owes it to the readers to steamline life, and give it some meaning people can extract for themselves. (by contrast, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius has an interesting take on the ethics of embellishment for the author.)
that's all.
bryan h.
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