Frey, James

American author James Frey wrote A Million Little Pieces, published by Doubleday in 2003. This memoir—about the author's struggle to overcome drug addiction—was selected by Oprah's Book Club in 2005 and appeared at the top of the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-sellers list. In 2006, The Smoking Gun, a Web site that uses legal documents to reveal scandals in the lives of famous people, published proof that Frey's book exaggerated, and even fabricated, important details about several events. In the aftermath of this revelation, Oprah Winfrey confronted Frey on her television show, publishers offered refunds for the book's purchase price, and Frey was dropped by his literary manager. Later editions of A Million Little Pieces and its sequel, My Friend Leonard (2005), included an Author's Note explaining the falsified details. Other memoirs published before A Million Little Pieces were revealed as fully or partially untrue, but the controversy surrounding Frey's work particularly impacted reviewer and reader reception of memoirs and influenced scholarly work about life writing.

In A Million Little Pieces, Frey uses a minimalist, slangy style to trace his trajectory from recreational drug user to addict and to recount his experiences in a treatment center. The book's reviews were mixed, and some even questioned the memoir's veracity, but—thanks to the popularity of Oprah's Book Club—the book sold nearly two million copies in 2005. A Million Little Pieces might have remained just another best seller if journalists from The Smoking Gun had never discovered evidence that sections of the purportedly nonfiction book were fictionalized.

In a January 2006 article, The Smoking Gun reported several findings. Frey's claim in A Million Little Pieces that he spent a week in jail following his first driving-under-the-influence (DUI) arrest was untrue; records from Berrien County, Michigan, indicate that he was released to his parents on bond and paid a $305 fine. While Frey tells a dramatic story about spending 90 days in jail after being arrested for hitting a police officer, disturbing the peace, and possessing a narcotic with intent to distribute, records from Licking County, Ohio, indicate that the author was never prosecuted or incarcerated for any of these crimes. In fact, he spent only five hours in custody, during which he received two traffic tickets and a summons for violating open container laws. (The fabricated Ohio episode also figures prominently in Frey's follow-up memoir, My Friend Leonard.)

The Smoking Gun was unable to find any Michigan or North Carolina records pertaining to Frey being wanted on charges of drug possession, even though these charges appear in the memoir and would, assumedly, appear in state paperwork. The Smoking Gun did succeed, however, in finding evidence undermining Frey's account of being [Page 398]ostracized for his role in a fatal accident in his hometown. Interviews with the victims' families and with police officers indicated that Frey had no connection with the accident, which functions in the memoir as a symbol of Frey's feelings of alienation.

After The Smoking Gun published its exposé, Frey appeared on Cable News Network's (CNN) Larry King Live to discuss the allegations. Frey defended his book by repeatedly stating that a memoir is by nature subjective, reliant on the author's recollections rather than fully verifiable. Winfrey called the show to proclaim her support of Frey and to suggest that the book's message of redemption remained valuable despite questions about factual accuracy.

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