In case you missed out as I did, the book was the No. 2 paperback sold in America last year. After an investigation sparked by The Smoking Gun Web site, it is now known that Frey used his real addiction to make up a hardboiled docudrama starring himself as a criminal outlaw who's still cool. Sound scripted? It was. Yet to date his publisher sells it as a memoir—as well as the sequel--part of the drift towards reality television, or television-like reality, which seems to have engulfed our entire culture.

James Frey's "memoir" tells the story of someone who graduates college while addicted to crack, becomes wanted in three states, and spends three months in jail for attacking police officers, according to newspaper accounts of the plot. While in jail Frey reads Tolstoy's "War and Peace" with his cellmate buddy, a hardened criminal; then he's off to a rough recovery institute where Frey relies on the 'brutal truth', rather than the famous AA 12-step method, to clear his head.

The important point is not that Frey took his past drug-use, a few DUI arrests, and stay at the upscale Hazelton clinic in Minnesota and transformed it into a sensationalized blockbuster. Since The Smoking Gun broke that no records exist for Frey's three month jail stint or the dozen other arrests recounted in his "memoir," Frey has admitted to making it up—and much else. The real problem is Random House’s and Doubleday’s refusal to distinguish memoir from novel, memory from imagination, truth from tale. What is next, fake history books?

Yet Frey has sold 3.5 million copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. Two million of those came after Oprah Winfrey read it and selected it for her very popular book club, reports the Washington Post in a Jan. 27 article. According to the Post, Oprah’s book club has 800,000 online members. Her T.V. show attracts 20 million viewers worldwide.

The book’s editor Nan Talese says Frey will insert an author's note in forthcoming editions. However, that does not change that Random House-owned Doubleday has treated the concept of truth in a memoir as another flexible ingredient in a product’s PR campaign.

Since 2003, Frey himself has done numerous interviews and book signings playing his fictional self. The New York Observer reports that Frey first shopped his book to publishers as a novel. It was rejected repeatedly. Doubleday editor and Random House executive Nan Talese selected his book to be published in 2003 as a hardcover "memoir." She claimed on Jan. 26, 2006 on Oprah's television show to have not fact-checked a word of it.

Frey shows the instinct of a novelist by taking his personality and amplifying it into a character. Ironically, his hardboiled tale more resembles cliché, glam fantasies about addiction than a long-term addict's dire path. And while Frey proves he has imagination, his prose style has Caps in Random places for Emotional
Emphasis. Clipped Sentences. Yes, an Arrogant six grader imitating Hemingway.

That Nan Talese likely knew it was fake would be a good guess. I bet Talese perceived this unknown author's outlandish fable would sell well as a "true story," and was Simply NOT well-Written Enough to be sold as a NOVEL. Would You like This for 400-plus Pages?

II.

Editor Nan Talese, speaking on Oprah, argued that memoirs are subjective accounts and implied that therefore Frey could be excused. While memoirs are subjective takes on events, they are supposed to be based on true events. In the Talese world, does Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir "Night" become just an emotional truth because the Holocaust never occurred? Today the Turkish government censors public comments regarding the 20th century Armenian genocide. If publishers label everything as a memoir, they bury first-person accounts of survivors along with the silenced dead.

When the U.S. government asserts a fact to the public, should it be factual or just an emotional truth? This is the trickle-down cultural economics that affects society when editors, publishers, and newspapers play loose. As George Orwell warned in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and dramatized in his novel "1984," when words are hollow, it is because an unspoken agenda lurks.

As people stop paying attention to words, people become controlled by words. In "1984," war is peace. Today, President Bush says the United States doesn't torture, despite the Abu Graib photographs and White House policy documents to the contrary. For roughly the last decade, millions of viewers have watched the television show "The West Wing" that has no discernible relation to political reality. In recent years, a number of prominent American historians have been revealed to be plagiarists. We are in the grip of a cultural trend in which imprecise but cherished human values are warping within the vice of commercial pressures. Few anymore bother to argue against it.

When large publishing conglomerates like Random House market something as a memoir, it becomes so for millions. Yet as The Smoking Gun has shown, independent researchers can change this commercial cultural landscape. Thinking back to both "The West Wing" and "A Million Little Pieces," I wonder if there is a forceful, cultural escapism at work today that, like a caged animal, demands to be fed by the half-truth industry. Like Rilke’s panther, does it pace in its cage?

As for Frey, he has a screenwriter’s imagination and the personal experience of recovery; he was encouraged to share neither. He lives with a story of recovery to tell; he has yet to tell it.

Are writers and editors powerless before the marketing machine of the cultural industry? Doubtful. It is writers and editors that work in the culture industry. They work alongside the marketing executives who may be "editors” in title only. As American poet Ezra Pound said, “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.”

Writers and editors can fight to work for presses and newspapers they respect; they can refuse to allow their autobiographies to be pitched as fiction or their fiction peddled as autobiography. Writers and editors can work for independent presses, create their own presses, self-publish, or pursue other professions while using free time to edit and write. Sometimes you have to give up your dream job when you discover it is in service of a nightmare.

American writer and poet Delmore Schwartz said, “In dreams begin responsibilities.” One can add: In responsibilities, dreams grow.