Fish don’t Frey in the kitchen
In Other Media is growing as weary of the James Frey fabrication story as you are, but we need to point you to a good piece by Tom Scocca in the latest edition of the New York Observer. Scocca’s opinion is summed up on the first line of the story: “First things first: James Frey is a liar.” And he continues in the second paragraph: “His best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is a fraud. It is a seamless mass of falsehoods, told deliberately, for the purpose of making money.”
Scocca saves some of his vitriol for Frey’s chief enabler, Oprah Winfrey. “Ms. Winfrey’s rebuke to the publishing industry was as false as Mr. Frey’s root-canal story,” he writes. “At that moment, on Larry King, she had the power to do something about the industry’s practices. She could have given Random House the same treatment she gave Hermès – calling out Mr. Frey as a fraud right there, denouncing the book as a lie and urging her viewer-readers to return it en masse, demanding refunds. She could have ordered the company to take the hundreds of thousands of extra dollars that Oprah’s Book Club had brought it and use the money to hire a raft of $25,000-a-year factcheckers to ensure that non-fiction books were sold on something more than the author’s say-so.”
Related links:
Click here for the New York Observer story
