Vanity Fair has an interview with A Million Little Pieces author James Frey – his first major one since his notorious appearance on Oprah’s show in 2006, and his last for a while, at least according to Vanity Fair. The magazine – as is its right – pumps up the “butterfly broken on the wheel” aspect of the story and comes on like a 1930s noir tell-all:

The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit.

We here at Quillblog remember a day – back when we were young and having remarkable and poignant experiences we reserve the right to one day lay out in book form – when memoirs were expected to be at least within the neighbourhood of the truth. In these relativist times, however, when the boundaries between “truth” and “fiction” are just about non-existent, a memoir is most commonly defined as “a novel, told in the first person, that sells a hell of a lot of copies.”

Over at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke wonders how the hell this all came to be. Slate also give us a sneak peek at the memoir scandals we can expect to see over the next couple of months, including at-last revealed stretchers from St. Augustine (“’There’s just no reason to believe that the thornbushes of lust ever grew rank about his head,’ says historian Carlo Ricci….”) and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi (“Satrapi does in fact have both lips and eyelids. She also confessed to ‘completely making up the whole two-dimension thing.’”).

After being much-chastised for trying to pass his first novel off as a memoir, James Frey, author of a A Million Little Pieces, is preparing to release a new novel in May. Apparently embracing his controversial side, Frey has asked artist Richard Prince to design the cover for Bright Shiny Morning, Page Six reports.

Prince has been shaking up the New York art scene with his highly sought-after photographs of billboards, such as Marlboro ads – works that were originally created by other photographers.

Some book-related links:

• 45 posthumous stories from Donald Barthelme (New York magazine)
• Richard & Judy to call it quits (CBC.ca)
• For nerds who love words: new virtual hangout for Star Wars poets (Paul Vermeersch)
• Settlement reached in James Frey kerfuffle (Yahoo)
• Biographizing living authors can be tricky (The New York Times)

Disgraced memoirist James Frey – who was made a star when Oprah Winfrey chose his book A Million Little Pieces for her book club, then humiliated when she berated him for embellishing the facts in said book – is showing signs of getting his career back on track.

After the Pieces scandal broke, Frey’s publisher, Riverhead, bailed on a deal to release his following two books. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, HarperCollins Canada has bought Frey’s first novel (insert the snide aside of your choice here).

Bright Shiny Morning will appear in summer 2008; according to the WSJ story, “The new book is set in contemporary Los Angeles and tracks the lives of various characters from different backgrounds. These include a male movie star, a Mexican maid, and a homeless man from Venice Beach.” No word on whether there’s a subplot involving a misunderstood artiste and a mean talk-show host.

Just when the dust seemed to have settled on the whole A Million Little Pieces kerfuffle, here comes the book’s editor, Nan Talese, to say that not only would she do everything exactly the same had she the chance to go back in time, but that it’s neither she nor James Frey who “should be apologetic,” but Oprah herself.

Talese offers the simplest, and the most audacious and bizarre, defense of Frey’s mendacity yet:

“When someone starts out and says, ‘I have been an alcoholic. I have lied. I have cheated’ … you do not think this is going to be the New Testament.”

In the spirit of Talese’s logic, Quillblog would now like to preempt all future accusations of libel, sloppy reporting, outright fabrication, and offensiveness by stating, for the record, that, hey, we’re only human. You’ve been warned.

Our BookExpo Canada preview, from the June issue of Q&Q.

Tentative optimism seems to be the general mood going into BookExpo Canada this year. After some exhibitor grumbling last year about high costs and low returns associated with the annual trade show, Reed Exhibitions is adding BOOKED!, a consumer book festival running alongside the convention. Hopes are high that the move will reinvigorate BookExpo, but as of late April (Q&Q’s press time), few details about the consumer event had been made public, leaving some publishers anxious to solidify plans.

BOOKED will run from June 7 through 9 (the BookExpo trade show will follow on June 10 and 11), and is being overseen by Geoffrey Taylor, director of International Readings at Harbourfront. The festival will be made up of two dozen events, half of them free and the others ranging in ticket price from $10 to $25, in locations across Toronto. BookExpo attendees will have to pay just like everyone else. Taylor says the aim is to have the festival pay for itself through ticket sales, and he was planning to put out a call for volunteers in May. “The whole thing’s supposed to be revenue-neutral,” says Taylor. “There are people out trying to find corporate partners, but from a planning point of view we’re trying to make it pay for itself.”

As for the lineup, Taylor says exhibiting publishers put forth 250 author names, which a selection committee (made up of reps from publishing and bookselling associations, as well as Taylor and BookExpo event director Dahlia de Rushe) has narrowed to around 50 for the inaugural year. But while publishers have been informed which of their authors made the cut – the list reportedly includes Naomi Klein, Jeannette Walls, David Bezmozgis, and Michael Redhill – no one has yet seen a detailed program. “You’re sort of presenting your authors blind,” says Lindsey Lowy, marketing manager for HarperCollins Canada. “You don’t really know what they’re getting into…. It’s difficult to put forth your best authors.” Still, Lowy has Richard B. Wright, Barbara Haworth-Attard, Susan Juby, and Kenneth Oppel all attending BOOKED.

And Taylor now says some BOOKED events will spill over the June 7-9 parameters. For example, H.B. Fenn and Company is bringing author James Patterson to both BOOKED and BookExpo, as part of his first Canadian tour in many years. Patterson’s BOOKED event is to take place on June 10, the first day of the trade show, but publicity manager Janis Ackroyd says she still doesn’t have a specific time, and the delays are holding back Fenn’s plans for the trade show as well: “We want to have Patterson in our booth, but we can’t determine the time of his booth appearance until we know all the details for BOOKED, which throws off the whole schedule because other authors don’t know their time,” says Ackroyd.

Taylor, for his part, concedes that the BOOKED committee is behind on the original schedule, but not, he says, “dangerously behind.” One major event has been booked for the John Bassett Theatre, while a children’s program has been scheduled for Fort York on the Friday. Taylor says most paid events have locations lined up, with only the free events still unsecured. And as part of an agreement with Toronto’s Luminato arts festival, also in its first year and running over the first week of June, the two festivals will share a space in a Luminato tent for at least one event.

BOOKED aside, it also remains to be seen how this year’s BookExpo convention and trade show will shake out. Last year’s trade show actually saw a noticeable increase in attendance, with 6,013 people attending, up 33% from the previous year. Bookseller numbers also rebounded, with a 15% increase, as 2,517 booksellers attended the show. But that still came against a backdrop of publisher concerns about high costs and few on-site orders. For years, BookExpo has been more of a networking event than a sales-generating one, but last year there was a renewed questioning of the status quo.

And this year, some exhibitors are slightly shrinking their presence. Simon & Schuster Canada, Random House of Canada, and the Literary Press Group are all reducing the size of their booths. LPG executive director Ronda Kellington says their booth will still feature author events, with an emphasis on first-time authors, but she expects that even fewer publishers than the 22 from last year will be represented. Heidi Winter, vice-president of marketing at H.B. Fenn, says the firm is producing fewer displays for its booth. And Whitecap Books, a perennial best-booth winner, won’t have its own booth at all this year, but will be exhibiting within the booth of its North American distributor, Firefly Books. Vice-president Nick Rundall says Whitecap will still have authors at the booth and blow-ups of the covers, and that the changes are for the ease of the booksellers – “assuming there are any.”

Still, most publishers are both returning and sticking to their booth size. “I remember last year there was that hooha about, ‘Oh, we should cancel BookExpo,’” says McArthur & Company president Kim McArthur. “I was never of the opinion that we should cancel BookExpo Canada.… I really always thought that it was extremely important to retain our own Canadian trade show for our own booksellers and our own authors and own companies.”

BOOKED isn’t the only addition to this year’s fest – Reed has also developed a new program for the trade show floor to spotlight children’s books, in an effort to attract more teachers and librarians. “Our Choice Best Bets” will feature 20 children’s authors and illustrators; each will speak for five minutes about a topic of their choice related to their new title. The Canadian Children’s Book Centre organized the event, which will take place on the presentation stage on both days of the trade show. The artists taking part in the program represent a cross-section of genres and target ages and include author team Jane Drake and Ann Love (whose Sweet! is reviewed on page 47 of this issue), creative non-fiction writer Barbara Greenwood, and author/illustrator Veronika Martenova Charles. But the list is also heavily Ontario-based, with only six participants coming from other provinces, including B.C. author kc dyer, Monique Polak from Quebec, and Nova Scotian illustrator Susan Tooke.

Young adult author Don Aker, one writer on the bill, says the time he gets with the audience will be worth the expense of coming from Nova Scotia. (Aker is mostly covering his own travel expenses, though his publisher, HarperCollins Canada, is footing his hotel bill.) He says his decision to come is spurred by the great reception Ontario teachers and librarians have given him in the past; the Ontario department of education approved his novel First Stone years before Nova Scotia tagged the work for classroom use.

Another addition to the trade show is a mystery event organized by Bloody Words, the annual Canadian mystery-writing conference of the same name. In the same vein as Best Bets, mystery authors will give readings on the presentation stage over the two days of the trade show. Cheryl Freedman, an organizer of the Bloody Words conference, says the final number of authors appearing is still undecided, but there will be fewer than at the Best Bets presentation, to allow the writers more time to read; some authors expected to appear include Linwood Barclay, Lyn Hamilton, Louise Penny, and Mary Jane Maffini.

Susan Dayus, the Canadian Booksellers Association’s executive director, says the author breakfasts and lunches, for both adult and children’s authors, will continue this year, with four in total. At press time the CBA was still contemplating opening up Saturday’s adult fiction lunch ­– which features Elizabeth Hay, Frances Itani, and Richard B. Wright – to the public. (The full breakfast and lunch lineups appear on pages 30-31.)

•••

As usual, the convention will kick off with two full days of professional development programming. Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council organized Friday’s publishing-focused lineup, “Devices and Desires,” while the CBA is running its annual “Super Saturday” programming for booksellers.

Friday’s lineup will address how new technology, especially the Internet, affects the publishing industry, and how publishers can reach online communities of readers. Cynthia Good, director of Humber’s Creative Book Publishing program, says the presentations and seminars look at how the future of book publishing can be seen now. “I believe that it’s no longer talking about a future – what will be the future of the book business and books and writing and bookselling and the whole book world,” says Good. “Everything is happening right now and we need to find a way to both learn and adjust creatively.”

The keynote speaker is Bob Young, founder of the print-on-demand website Lulu.com, who will argue that self-publishing is changing the publishing business. To balance Young’s viewpoint, former CBC Radio personality Mary Lou Finlay will be the responder, speaking for more traditional publishing models and touching on the issue of maintaining quality and standards. Attendees also have a choice of two workshops from a list of six that address new methods in marketing and promotion. Good says seminars are available both for the technologically savvy and for publishers new to online possibilities. (The cost of the day is up slightly to $125, though a reduced fee of $75 is available to students and members of The Writers’ Union of Canada; a full list of the day’s programming appears on pages 30-31.)

On the “Super Saturday” front, the CBA is expanding its members’ forum this year, after a strong response last year. “They kept bringing in chairs,” says Susan Dayus. “We had people up the aisles, up the front, down the back standing.” This year, the forum is being opened up to include non-CBA members – though attendance is still restricted to booksellers – and accordingly, it’s being renamed the Booksellers’ Industry Forum. Booksellers will also have more time to discuss ideas, as the roundtables following the forum are longer.

At the forum, the CBA will also unveil the results of an industry survey commissioned last year to measure Canadian booksellers’ profitability. And in its trade show booth, the association will be selling a manual for training new staff who have no previous experience in the book industry. Various CBA board directors helped write the manual, which will cost just under $20.

As organizers and exhibitors pull together the final details of this year’s show, they do so while facing the usual complaints about BookExpo, such as its seemingly permanent location in Toronto. Somewhat surprisingly, last year’s main complaint – the lack of firm orders – appears almost forgotten in the advent of BOOKED. The LPG’s Ronda Kellington, for example, refers to the expectation of order-taking at the trade show as “old-fashioned.” Says Kellington: “We thought there was good energy in our booth [last year]. We just want to create some energy, we want to get people into the booth, have a lot of traffic … and get LPG and our publishers into their brains for the fall.”

According to Reed’s Dahlia de Rushe, attendees will have an opportunity to express any concerns with the show, as Reed will once again solicit a cross-section of industry representatives for feedback. An advisory board will be set up following the close of this year’s show to “give direction on major strategic changes and major objectives,” says de Rushe.

For now, most publishers say they’re still committed to the trade show and are going in with a positive attitude. “All the publishers big and small have kind of come together to really try and reinvigorate BEC this year,” says Simon & Schuster’s vice-president of marketing and publicity, Rosslyn Junke, who was on BOOKED’s author selection committee. “People have put their best foot forward this year.”

Still, BOOKED may add more pressure for this year’s show to perform well. Random House director of marketing Linda Scott, who is co-chair of the marketing team behind the readers’ festival, is hoping that attendees will not be overly critical of the new venture. “Realistically, with change there are growing pains,” says Scott. “I would hope … people aren’t looking so critically at the initial changes that if it wasn’t perfect they would throw up their hands and say it didn’t work.”

THIS STORY HAS BEEN CORRECTED: A passage mistakenly stating that the McArthur & Company booth will have a new layout this year has been deleted.

Just before 2006 gave out its last gasp, a number of book commentators took a look back at a year in books that was, if not quite horribilis, at least a little disappointingis.

Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman came up with his own list of “literary losers” of the year. The not-much-missed Judith Regan ranks high for the O.J. fiasco, as does our own Alberto Manguel for the year’s “most pretentious comment.” Manguel’s crime was picking, as his favourite book of the year, “a 50-page-long essay by the Hungarian scholar László Földényi, Dosztojevszkij Szibérában Hegelt Olvassa, és sírva fakad (Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and weeps).” Kelly notes that “although he confesses to having no Hungarian, Manguel chose to reproduce the title in that language.”

In the Toronto Star, resident critic Philip Marchand runs through some of the more noteworthy book moments of the year — the James Frey scandal, the deaths of Irving Layton and Mickey Spillane, the use of a wildly inappropriate metaphor in Michael Redhill’s latest novel — and tries to suss out what they mean to the larger culture. (Marchand gets more than halfway through the piece before mentioning his onetime biographical subject Marshall McLuhan, which is actually pretty good for him.) He also has a piece on the “critical shots of the year” that is well worth reading.

And finally, The Globe and Mail asked a number of writers and celebrities for their favourite reads of the year. Many of the choices are predictable — lots of non-fiction about looming ecological disasters — but one notable pick comes from Vincent Lam, whose Bloodletting won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 2006. Lam picks Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, which had been the odds-on favourite to win the prize. Perhaps this kind of gracious, peacemaking gesture will set the tone for the coming year. And if not, well, graciousness and peace are boring, anyway.

Related links:
The Scotsman’s literary losers of 2006
Read Philip Marchand on the year in books
Read Marchand on the year in literary criticism
Read the favourites in The Globe and Mail

In case anyone missed it, James Frey has spoken in-depth to a reporter – Laura Barton, writing for The Guardian – for the first time since the massive controversy over his Oprah-anointed but exaggerated “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces. The interview makes for a longish and frustrating and not very rewarding piece, so we’ll save you some time by highlighting the most salient points.

1. All that media attention sure has made for a rough few months.

2. People on the street understand, though. “Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew.”

3. Doubleday surely must have known from the start that Pieces was a “manipulated manuscript.”

4. Frey was a cultural scapegoat. “People feel frustrated by a lot of distortions by politicians, by members of the media, by movie stars, by tabloid journalists, and it was like a sorta confluence of events that I happened to be in the middle of.”

5. The Smoking Gun, the website that broke the news of the book’s falsehoods, was just doing its job – but really, it’s kind of a sleazy job, innit? “Their job is to get people to come to their website, to look at what they do. I just never thought that I was that big a target.”

6. He did have an anesthesia-free root canal – or at least, that’s what’s “true to my memory.”

7. North Americans can’t grasp the nuances of the dance between fiction and non- because they’re simply unsophisticated. “I think it has in certain ways to do with being a young culture, with being a culture that has less of an artistic and literary canon than some of the older European cultures.”

8. The publishers and agents who disowned Frey during the controversy are still making lots of money from his work.

Actually, he may have a point with that last one.

A couple of points that are intriguingly not explored in the article are: (a) How has Frey spent the money he’s made? Has he given any of it away? And (b) If the book was always meant to be a kind of postmodern freeplay of fact and fiction, why did he repeatedly insist that every word was true until it was proven otherwise?

Anyway, lest we think that the Frey fiasco has soured the market on confessional memoirs, writer Choire Sicha sets us straight with a feature in The New York Observer. And the story looks at the interesting question of where the policies of Alcoholics Anonymous — to which many such memoirists belong — fit in. “Members of A.A. have been struggling with the significance of that second ‘A’ for more than half a century. Within the group, members openly discuss their alcoholism; outside the group, they refrain from discussing their membership. That’s the theory.”

Related links:
Click here for the James Frey interview
Click here for the New York Observer feature

The Guardian features an article today about Kathy O’Beirne, whose bestselling memoir Don’t Ever Tell (sold as Kathy’s Story in Ireland) came under fire yesterday from seven of her brothers and sisters, who “denounced the book as a work of fiction.”

The memoir is an account of O’Beirne’s life from the age of eight to 21, during which time she was allegedly placed in various Catholic foster services, including one of the notorious Magdalene laundries. The Guardian describes the book as “a grim catalogue of sexual abuse, beatings and rape.”

Her siblings are looking to have the book taken off shelves, but Mainstream, her publisher in Edinburgh, supports the book, insisting that they “took steps” before publishing that “included working closely with Kathy O’Beirne and providing the opportunity for comment or correction to the archdiocese of Dublin by submitting relevant material to it.”

However, one of the institutions implicated in the book, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, has also dismissed it as unreliable.

Quillblog wonders: who is Ireland’s equivalent to Oprah?

Related links:
Read The Guardian story here

The New York Times confirms a story that appeared on Radaronline.com earlier this week that “James Frey, the author who admitted making up portions of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and his publisher, Random House, have agreed in principle on a settlement with readers who filed lawsuits claiming they had been defrauded.”

The Times relies on an anonymous source for details of the settlement because it has yet to be approved by a judge, but states that “consumers who bought the book on or before Jan. 26 – when both the publisher and author released statements acknowledging that Mr. Frey had altered certain facts – will be eligible for a full refund.” If you didn’t keep your receipt, the publisher will accept some other proofs of purchase such as a particular page of the hardcover novel or the paperback’s front cover.

Quillblog prefers the more creative terms set out in a mock memo from Random House on Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog. The memo promises a refund of $4.24 for anyone returning the dust jacket with a hand-drawn moustache on the author’s photo, and a special offer: “If you send us a videotape, a VCD, or a DVD, in which you can demonstrate that you led or coerced a group of people to throw at least 200 copies into a public bonfire, we would like to offer you a promising career here at Random House.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times
Click here for Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog

Radar Online is reporting that Random House U.S. is looking to settle the various class-action lawsuits brought against it by readers of James Frey’s notoriously fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces who claim they were victims of fraud.

As part of the settlement, Random House (which has not confirmed any of the details of the story) will offer a full refund to all who bought the book before it was officially announced to contain many, mmm, embellishments. The catch: you need your original sales receipt to claim the money, so unless you’ve been using it as a bookmark, tough luck.

Another unconfirmed rumour has it that Random House is planning to send an English professor to the home of every enraged reader of Frey’s tome to explain the meaning of the expression “caveat lector.”

Related links:
Read the Radar Online story here

The Wall Street Journal site has an article on the increasing popularity of the memoir genre — this in spite of, or perhaps partially because of, the recent James Frey controversy. Staffer Robert J. Hughes looks at the variety of memoirs currently on the market, from celebrity tell-alls to political memoirs to in-depth treatments of life-changing events by the famous and the unknown. The article is also useful as a primer on the differences between autobiography and memoir. “Autobiographies typically cover a person’s entire life,” Hughes writes, “while memoirs usually are confined to a specific period or relationship in that person’s life.” This interpretive focus lends itself to a more stylized treatment of biographical material, though it is the very “literary” nature of the memoir that leaves it open to the kind of scam Frey pulled on his gullible readers. (Thanks to Bookninja.com for the post.)

Related links:
Read the Wall Street Journal article

In Other Media has done a good job of not posting about James Frey in recent weeks, but this one was too good to pass up. Author Peter Carey, who has a well-documented interest in literary hoaxes and a new novel coming out, weighed in on the whole mess in a recent interview in The Bookseller that Gawker linked to on Friday. Says Carey: “It’s trite to say it, but the U.S. is a country run by liars going to war on a fantasy, so it’s interesting to see people getting self-righteous about James Frey. And by the way, if you’re going to publish a memoir by an addict in rehab, everyone knows that one of the corollaries of addiction is lying. So I don’t see why everyone gets into such a fucking uproar because an addict is a liar! Oprah acted like a total bully: talk about about crushing a butterfly on a wheel — or a cockroach on a wheel — because that’s what she did on television to this little creep.”

Related links:
Click here for the Gawker item
Click here for the Carey interview in The Bookseller

Wall Street Journal media reporter Jeffrey Trachtenberg gives the Media Bistro site his take on a few of publishing’s recent hot topics, including technology, genre trends, and someone named James Frey. He also discusses the blog-to-book phenomenon, suggesting that while a blog may not be a guarantee of authorial success, it probably can’t hurt. Says Trachtenberg: “It is a significant advantage for authors to have what the industry calls a ‘platform,’ be it a show on radio or TV, a newspaper column, or, increasingly, a popular blog. Book publicists can only do so much.”

Related links:
Click here for the Media Bistro Q&A with Jeffrey Trachtenberg

Here at In Other Media, controversy makes us as giddy as the recipients of brand new puppies on Valentine’s Day morning. In the last month or so, we linked to as many stories on James Frey as there were alleged lies in his book A Million Little Pieces. Now, on this side of the border, we have a little bookish hilarity to call our own.

Yesterday, we linked to a review in the Sunday Toronto Star in which writer and reviewer Ryan Bigge scoured the English and German lexicons for words to describe just how bad he thought Leah McLaren’s debut novel, The Continuity Girl, was. Today we combed the archives to find the article that may have started it all: a column featured in The Globe and Mail in 2001, written by one Ms. McLaren about Bigge’s debut, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy. Like Bigge did in his review of The Continuity Girl, McLaren chose not to review the book so much as defame its writer. To this end, McLaren used more than half of her column to define a term that she coined and that no one ever used again. Lurpers, she writes, are the angry young men of the 21st century – cynics who have a hate-on for all that they don’t have but secretly want: “success, confidence, fame, money, sex, charm, recognition, art, conversational ease, style, respect, drugs, a sense of wonder…. He is Holden Caulfield 10 years later, a grown boy, who in the words of Philip Roth, approaches life ‘with all the arrogance of someone who has succeeded at nothing.’”

“Like so many Lurpers, Bigge is an established legend in his own mind. He even has his own Web site to prove it. His first book, A Very Lonely Planet: Love, Sex and the Single Guy, will be published by Vancouver small press Arsenal Pulp this month. The title could actually be Anatomy of a Hard-up Lurper.”

Ouch. From whence comes such a personal attack? Do these two know each other? Couldn’t McLaren, who has now written of a childless woman, have had sympathy instead of vitriol for the perpetually single Bigge? One thing seems clear: riffling through the discount tables at Pages the other day, In Other Media found copies of Bigge’s book. We can all be somewhat sure that, someday, in that very same spot, will be McLaren’s. So can’t we all just get along?

Related links:
Click here for McLaren’s review of A Very Lonely Planet, as featured on Bigge’s website
Click here to read comments posted in response to yesterday’s installment of the McLaren-Bigge feud

Novelist Kenneth J. Harvey does his own take on the James Frey controversy in a satirical piece on the website for The Times. Working from the premise that if Frey can justify the non-fiction label attached to his largely fictional memoir by claiming that the majority of what he wrote was true, Harvey questions whether the latest Man Booker Prize winner, John Banville’s novel The Sea, can actually be called fiction. After all, the novel takes place in Ireland, a real country. Harvey also discovers that there are at least four people in Ireland named Max Morden, the name of the novel’s protagonist. This leads Harvey to conclude that “a comprehensive investigation is in order. If the sanctioned percentage of fact (to be determined by James Frey) exceeds the appropriate percentage of fiction, I suggest that it would be prudent for the Booker committee to strip Banville of his award.”

Related links:
Read Kenneth J. Harvey’s piece in The Times

As if James Frey doesn’t have enough problems to deal with, now he’s got readers in Quebec threatening him with a lawsuit over his misrepresentation of the facts in A Million Little Pieces. An article posted on the CTV website is reporting that outraged reader Joshua Adam Levy is launching a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Quebec readers to the tune of $2-million. Levy’s lawyer claims that the lawsuit would never have been launched if the book had been labelled as fiction and even goes so far as to say that “Levy … has lost confidence in the memoir genre.”

Related links:
Read the article on the CTV site

In an essay recently posted on The Observer’s website, Tim Adams explores the role of misery in British pop culture, writing of immensely popular “true-life” tabloid-style magazines that are filled with brief, fluffily written, and tragic stories of child abuse and murder, and a Big Brother-style reality TV show featuring a house of heroin addicts attempting to kick their habits.

First-person non-fiction accounts of tragedy, what Adams calls “misery memoirs,” are also common, so common that Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan of Channel 4’s popular Richard and Judy Book Club recently held a contest in which viewers could call in and reveal the tragedies of their lives. Thousands responded, finalists were chosen, and viewers were asked to vote on their favourite, which then received a £25,000 book deal with Random House.

As one would expect, the essay segues into a discussion about James Frey. According to Adams, Frey’s case is the perfect illustration of the opposition between “real life, complex and nuanced and difficult,” and “‘real life,’ manufactured and marketed and manipulative.” He argues that, in this age of reality entertainment, people derive pleasure from the pain of others and look, ironically, to human tragedy as an escapist device through which one “can indulge [one]self in other people’s emotions without ever properly engaging in the messy business of real life.”

Related links:
Click here for the Tim Adams piece

One of the more perplexing things about the James Frey crucifixion on Oprah last week was publisher Nan Talese’s somewhat patrician attitude to Oprah’s anger at Doubleday’s failure to check any of the facts in Frey’s pseudo-memoir. Talese generally avoided Oprah’s most probing questions and said that up until she read the report on The Smoking Gun she believed in the absolute veracity of the book, including Frey’s contention that he had two root canals done without novocaine. Though Doubleday has since issued an apology over the incident, Talese remains unmoved by the whole affair, if an article in The Wall Street Journal is any indication. According to the article, Talese received a standing ovation from her underlings upon returning to her midtown Manhattan office and has since received more than 500 e-mails, the “overwhelming majority [of which] have been supportive,” she says, withoug specifying what exactly the respondents are in support of. The article also examines the supposed grey area between legal vetting and fact checking, and examines the possible repercussions on the non-fiction book market. (Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Read the article in The Wall Street Journal

See what happens when popular TV shows feature authors as guests – everybody’s talking about it. James Frey’s smackdown at the hands of Oprah Winfrey Thursday has been parsed a million times already, but here’s one more from Salon. However, Hillary Frey (no relation) thinks that Winfrey took it a bit too far. “As the audience clapped when Oprah spit out a real zinger (”It’s a lie!”; “I think you presented a false person”), it was hard to avoid thinking that Frey was being put on display not to set the record straight, but for a public flogging,” Frey writes. “More than once Oprah emphasized that this experience has ‘embarrassed’ her. Her revenge: shaming another person in front of a live studio audience. Who knew that Oprah was an ‘eye for an eye’ kind of lady?”

The writer also pokes fun at the most absurd part of Thursday’s show: the other panellists and writers who appeared on the show either in person or via videotape. New York Times columnist Frank Rich used his face time to take the whole Frey/Oprah thing and – yes, it’s true! – connect it to corporate scandals and the Bush administration. (It’s nice to see Rich branching out and offering challenging, unique perspectives on the problems of our time.) Writes (H.) Frey: “Rich took it one leap further, decrying lying in all aspects of culture, including Enron, the sham of Jessica Simpson’s marriage to Nick Lachey and the war in Iraq (at which point Oprah’s eyes glazed over). This took what was decent, if depressing, theater to the level of farce.”

Related links:
Click here for the Salon story

Well, now we know why James Frey cancelled his appearance in Toronto, which was scheduled for Thursday. We may have assumed he was simply going into low-profile mode, but it turns out something else came up: Oprah Winfrey had the fibbing author back onto her TV show on Thursday, and she wasn’t happy with him.

In the latest twist in the saga (a post-holiday gift that keeps on giving, at least for us publishing-media types), Oprah has reversed her original stance of supporting Frey and now says that he “betrayed millions of people.” When she brought him out in person, her main question was “Why did you lie?”

Frey’s original publisher, Doubleday’s Nan Talese, was also on hand. Was she repentant? Has she taken anything away from all this? Well, according to the Gawker recap, she took the opportunity to testify that she once underwent a root canal without novocaine, in support of one of the more preposterous unverified claims in Frey’s book, A Million Little Pieces.

The New York Times and Gawker have the first of what will undoubtedly be many, many post-mortems; the Gawker one is more complete, at least at this writing.

Related links:
Click here for the Gawker recap of Frey’s latest Oprah appearance
Click here for the NYT article

Given current levels of inspiration following last night’s election results, In Other Media sees fit to return, one last time, to the well-worn comfort of the James Frey fiasco. Remember when Frey appeared on Larry King Live, testifying to the essential truth of his so-called memoir, A Million Little Pieces? Remember one of Frey’s chief defences – that investigative website The Smoking Gun disputed only a small portion of the book? Remember how he claimed that the rest of the book, set in a Minnesota drug rehabilitation centre, was essentially true?

Well, apparently, there are things rehab counsellors can say about the stays of alleged patients in their centres that could make things worse for people like Frey. And apparently, most of those things were said by many counsellors to Edward Wyatt in an article appearing today in The New York Times.

Wyatt reports that more than three months before The Smoking Gun’s report, and even before Oprah Winfrey had Frey on her show, Debra Jay, a frequent guest on Oprah and a counsellor formerly affiliated with the Hazelden rehabilitation centre in Center City, Minnesota, where Frey was allegedly committed, told producers of the show that “his portrayal of his experience there grossly distorted reality.”

“His description of treatment at Hazelden is almost entirely false,” said Jay. “I’m coming forward because his descriptions of treatment are so damaging…. These are things that could not happen to anybody at Hazelden or at any reputable licensed treatment center.”

Jay and other former Hazelden counsellors claim that Frey’s book may have done more harm than good, insofar as addictions treatment is concerned. “I have had young people say to me that if they had a child who was having problems, they would never send them to treatment after reading that book,” says former Hazelden counsellor Carol Colleran, adding that according to her experiences at the Hazelden, “98 percent of that book is false.”

In response to these claims, Frey resorted to tried and true Defence No. 2: “I told James that I’ve been there, that I worked there and I’ve never seen any of those things happen at Hazelden,” said John H. Curtiss, who worked at Hazelden for more than 19 years. “In a million years those things would not happen at Hazelden. He said that was his recollection, but that he changed the names.”

Winfrey and her associates were, as usual, unavailable for comment.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

Ever walked into a bookstore and noticed that one of the employees was getting cute with the endcaps — devoting one of them entirely to yellow-covered titles, for instance? In the fall of 2004, San Francisco’s Adobe Bookshop took that approach to the extreme by hosting an installation called “There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World” — 20,000 books arranged specifically by colour.

Related links:
Click here for photos of the installation
Click here for some general information (from McSweeney’s)
Click here for an interview with creator Chris Cobb (from McSweeney’s)

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

Apparently there is a little more to say about the James Frey fiasco. In an interesting essay on the calendarlive.com site, Tim Rutten disputes Frey’s assertion that his book’s literary merit and therapeutic message of hope and healing easily trump those pesky autobiographical discrepancies that everyone is making such a fuss about. Frey’s book dismisses counselling methods that have helped millions of addicts recover and lead meaningful lives, claiming that what every addict needs to do is just stop being such a victim and face up to their own problems. Rutten points out the danger in this: “If [Frey’s conclusions] were based on his actual analysis of his actual experience that would be one thing. But precisely what are they, if they are based — as we now know they are — on a lurid series of fictions? What sort of people appeal to a ‘higher’ or ‘essential’ literary truth in urging suffering individuals to disregard sound medical and psychological advice?” Rutten then provides two choice adjectives to describe such people: “sleazy” and “despicable.” (Thanks to bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Read Tim Rutten’s essay on calendarlive.com

The controversy continues over allegations that James Frey invented/embellished chunks of his Oprah-sanctioned bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The latest bit of news is that the next printing of Frey’s book will include a note from the author that will address this. As Hillel Italie of The Associated Press reports, however, it is unclear what Frey will write in his author’s note: “Doubleday spokeswoman Alison Rich declined to offer details about the note or to comment on why it was being added. She would not say if the note was an acknowledgment often found in memoirs but not in A Million Little Pieces that names and events had been altered.” In Other Media is sincerely hoping that the author’s note addresses beard-trimming techniques. (Was it just me or did his beard look a little mangy on Larry King Live?)

The story broke last Sunday on The Smoking Gun, so, just in time for the weekend newspapers, readers should be girding themselves for think pieces and other related fare, like this list on the CBC Arts website of the top 10 literary hoaxes, which includes everything from Ern Malley (the inspiration for Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake) to David Solway’s creation, Andreas Karavis.

One of the best articles on the controversy so far is on Slate, where journalist Seth Mnookin, who has dealt with his own addiction problems, says that Frey’s fabrications are typical of the insecurity that he often encountered in rehab: “Based on all the evidence, it seems Frey’s weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a ‘victim’ led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt.” Mnookin goes on to point out, however, that Frey’s fabrications are significant because of the simplistic message about addiction that the book reinforces.

Related links:
Click here for the AP story
Click here for the CBC Arts
Click here for the Slate article

Frey Week continues here on In Other Media. Today, we spotlight the transcript of the embattled author’s appearance on Larry King Live last night.

In defending his memoir A Million Little Pieces against charges that significant parts had been exaggerated or fabricated, Frey hit a few key messages again and again: that “memoir” means you’re allowed to make stuff up; that only a tiny portion of the book has been disputed; and that his story’s “essential truth” (a phrase he uttered seven times, according to the transcript) remains unaffected by any embellishments. Frey also brought out his own mother to plead his case, a move that seems a little incongruous with the macho posturing he’s known for.

Apparently his explanations were good enough for Oprah, who broke her silence on the controversy by calling into the King show, saying “although some of the facts have been questioned … the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me. And I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book and will continue to read this book.”

In Other Media, though, feels the need to point out a couple things. For one, that writers who prefer to get at “the essential truth” without being bound by the facts usually do so in books called “novels.” And that in fact Frey shopped his book as a novel before he and Doubleday decided to publish it as a memoir instead. (To be fair, King did grill Frey about that one a bit.) And finally, as for the “tiny portion” argument, the distortions and exaggerations that The Smoking Gun uncovered represent only the parts of Frey’s book that can be compared against public records. Most of the story takes place within the confidentiality-protected walls of a rehab clinic, and a couple of major characters are now dead.

Which means readers have to take Frey’s word for the accuracy of the bulk of the book — and why on Earth should they?

In Frey news closer to home, the Toronto Star’s Judy Stoffman reports that the author’s scheduled appearance at the Elgin Winter Garden in Toronto on Jan. 26 is still going ahead as planned.

Related links:
Click here for the transcript of the Larry King Live appearance
Click here for the Toronto Star piece

An article in today’s New York Times collects the responses, or lack thereof, to the allegations that James Frey falsified much of the content in his bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces. The publishers of the hardcover and paperback editions of the book, Doubleday and Anchor Books, respectively, both divisions of Random House, issued a joint statement that downplayed the importance of truth in memoirs. “Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence,” it read. “By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided A Million Little Pieces was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections.” The statement continues: “Recent accusations against him notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.”

But Edward Wyatt, the writer of the Times article, says that the statement’s lack of definitive comment on the objective truth of the memoir suggests that little to no fact-checking was done by the book’s publishers. None will be done after the fact of publication, either, according to Doubleday and Anchor spokesperson Alison Rich. “This is not a matter that we deem necessary for us to investigate,” she said.

Needless to say, many readers are miffed and many key figures in the book’s publication and popularization, including Frey’s agent Kassie Evashevski, his editor Sean McDonald, who signed Frey on for two more books with the Penguin imprint Riverhead Books, and the one who started all the hoopla, Oprah Winfrey, were unavailable for comment.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

Another recent article from The New York Times maintains that James Frey is not the only popular author who faked a hard life. Times writer Warren St. John may have answered a question vexing literary hipsters for years: just who is JT Leroy?

St. John affirms our suspicions when he says the author we know as Leroy may be nothing more than a fictional character. This would explain Leroy’s reluctance to speak to press and give public readings, his affinity for communication via e-mail and fax, the payment of his advances and writer’s fees to a company in Nevada, and the sunglasses-wig-and-hat get-up he sports while making public appearances.

We linked last October to a story written by Stephen Beachy and published in New York Magazine, which theorized that one of the people who was reported to have saved Leroy from a life of homelessness, hustling, and drug addiction, Laura Albert, was also the true writer of books supposedly written by JT Leroy. The article prompted an investigation by the Times into the circumstances surrounding an article Leroy wrote for the paper in its Travel section. Then a photograph of Savannah Knoop, Albert’s half-sister-in-law, surfaced. Writes St. John, “Five intimates of Mr. Leroy’s, including his literary agent, his business manager and the producer of a forthcoming movie based on one of his books, were shown the photograph and identified Ms. Knoop as the person they have known as JT Leroy.”

St. John says that Albert, Knoop, and other orchestrating parties conjured the hoax as a bid for wealth and access to celebrities, but a conflict remains. Central to the popularity of Leroy’s work — and to his mystique — was the view that the things he wrote about were directly inspired by his own life experiences. The news of Leroy’s true identity has, no doubt, left his many supporters — celebrities and readers alike — feeling cheated.

“To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this,” said Ira Silverberg, Leroy’s agent. “A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times
Click here for Beachy’s October article in New York magazine

On Tom Bartlett’s blog, Minor Tweaks, nestled among delightful non-sequitur features that include letters to consumer products (they, or rather their representatives, answer), dead celebrity iTunes playlists, and cheese reviews, is a send-up of James Frey, who has recently been accused by investigative website The Smoking Gun of falsifying much of his bestselling so-called memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The entry, entitled “What I Plan to Embellish for Obvious Dramatic Reasons in My Own Forthcoming Memoir,” is short and simple, but replete with charming lies: “An argument with my roommate over dish duty will become a heroin-fuelled knife fight in some dimly lit, garbage-strewn back alley,” he writes. “My fondness for hot tea will turn into a nasty coke habit…. Instead of following the normal rules of capitalization, I will randomly capitalize common Nouns in order to seem Artsy and Profound even though it’s actually just an annoying Tic.”

(Thanks to BookSlut.com for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for Bartlett’s piece (requires scrolling)

Investigative website The Smoking Gun has an extensive and well-nigh irrefutable article exposing the many exaggerations and fabrications in James Frey’s bestselling memoir of addiction, crime, and recovery, A Million Little Pieces. Many readers were introduced to the book on an Oprah tearfest in October, when Frey was interviewed for the show’s massively popular Book Club segment. The six-page Smoking Gun article refutes several of Frey’s tales of hard living, including his contentions that he was involved in a train accident, his various jail sentences, and a violent, crack-induced confrontation with police in Ohio. The article also documents Frey’s attempt to stop the site’s investigation into the veracity of his memoir.

Related links:
Read The Smoking Gun article

The U.S. book news site, The Book Standard, has published a list of the top 200 bestselling books of 2005 in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the latest Harry Potter was #1. In second is James Frey’s Oprah-endorsed memoir, A Million Little Pieces. “Frey’s drug-rehab memoir sold 1,769,000 units as a paperback since its publication in September,” says The Book Standard. Rounding out the top five, in order, are: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, 1776 by David McCullough, and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. The top Canadian-authored book is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink at #13, sandwiched between Your Best Life Now by toothy TV preacher Joel Osteen and Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About by shifty TV huckster Kevin Trudeau.

Related links:
Click here for The Book Standard’s full list

Indigo’s CEO and chief booklover Heather Reisman was on the tube the other day announcing her favourite books of the year. (In Other Media had Canada AM on because we were waiting for Live! with Regis and Kelly to start — their banter is genuine and delightful!) A couple of the picks were standard, like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which now officially has to be included on all year-end best books lists or else the taste police will confiscate your library (or Indigo Rewards) card, and the latest Doris Kearns Goodwin book about Lincoln or Taft or somesuch. But you know what wasn’t on the list? That’s right, a Canadian book. Adam Gopnik’s kids book, The King in the Window, could, in some marginal way, qualify, since he lived in Montreal, but otherwise, there were none.

The full list is on the CTV site, where your official Giller Prize network has listed James Frey’s memoir, My Friend Leonard, under “good fiction.” They also have a link to the video of Reisman’s appearance. Take one drink every time Reisman says “delicious.” And two drinks every time you think you see a little part of host Seamus O’Regan’s soul leaving his body.

Related links:
Click here for the CTV story