It’s a tell-all book about an elite military unit the Department of National Defence didn’t want published for reasons of national security, and now pointed questions are being raised over whether some of the incidents it chronicles actually happened.
The 261-page book, titled Nous étions invincibles (We Were Invincible), is billed as the first insider’s account by a former member of the Joint Task Force 2, a covert anti-terrorism unit stationed near Ottawa.
The unauthorized memoir, penned in French, went on sale in Quebec last Wednesday – a day after its Quebec City-based co-author, Denis Morisset, was arrested on charges he contacted two minors for the purposes of committing a sexual offence.
Some of the exploits Morisset recounts – like the unit’s role in taking out 17 Shining Path guerrillas during a Peruvian hostage-taking in 1996 – have been documented elsewhere. But others, such as claims that six of his fellow unit members have committed suicide, the tale of a botched mission in Afghanistan, or the account of a commando raid to “eliminate” hostage-takers during an Ottawa bank heist in 1994, can’t be independently verified. A spokesperson for the Ottawa Police Service told the TorontoStar “there was no such incident.”
We obviously have no idea who’s lying in this case – whether Morisset is at all credible, or whether the charges against him are legit – but is somebody to quash the book and undercut his allegations, having unnamed spokesmen deny them and having him arrested on a sleazy charge the day before the book is launched would be one way to do it. Speaking hypothetically, of course.
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.
Following the recent controversy over whether or not a Lonely Planet guidebook author faked some of the book’s contents, Chris Taylor – who has himself written a number of Lonely Planet guides – weighs in on what he sees as an industry in decline.
Guidebook publishers will deny this, but the travel publishing industry is bound to exploit demand for what is widely seen as a glamour job — travel and get paid for it. But with so many competing guidebook series, many titles do not generate sales revenue that justifies the legwork that results in genuine personal recommendations. Most publishers who make claims to the contrary are being disingenuous.
In this context, Lonely Planet is probably one of the most responsible industry players. Nevertheless, pay rates for Lonely Planet writers have dropped with the proliferation of competing guidebook series in the past two decades. When Lonely Planet chief executive Stephen Palmer told the BBC (Lonely Planet is 75% owned by BBC World, the commercial arm of the BBC) this week that “we’re pretty confident we pay at the top of the range”, his confidence was not misplaced. What he neglected to say — and I have seen many examples — is that his company’s internal authors’ forum bristles with author posts about pay rates that have forced them to cut corners.
According to The Baltimore Sun, hometown hero Tom Clancy is heading to Maryland’s highest court today to do battle with Wanda T. King – formerly Wanda Clancy – over rights to a series of books that bears his name.
At issue is a lucrative series of a dozen books called Tom Clancy’s Op-Center – a fictional U.S. anti-terrorist agency written in a Clancy-esque style and given muscular titles such as Op-Center: Acts of War and Op-Center: State of Siege. […] Clancy will fight to overturn a 2005 decision by a Calvert County Circuit Court judge giving [his ex-wife] control of [the] series.
While Clancy and former-friend-turned-business-adversary Steve Pieczenik are credited with creating the series, the bulk of the writing has fallen to a less exalted author named Jeff Rovin – whose name can generally be found on the covers in much smaller print than Clancy’s. […] The famous writer apparently became disenchanted with the series after King walked away with an equal share of the Jack Ryan Limited Partnership as part of the couple’s divorce settlement. In an e-mail introduced as evidence in the case, Clancy said of the Op-Center books: “I don’t even read them.”
The most gossipy parts of the story are toward the end, when Sun reporter Michael Dresser looks back at the messy-sounding divorce that preceded all of this.
Tom and Wanda Clancy’s marriage of more than 25 years apparently began falling apart in 1995, when she filed for divorce charging that her husband had committed adultery with a New York woman nicknamed “Ping-Ping” whom he met over the Internet.
[…]
In the Calvert County trial, Clancy claimed he wanted to take his name off the Op-Center novels for business reasons. Among other things, he claimed that the books were not making money and were hurting his “literary reputation.”
[…]
Pieczenik quoted Clancy as vowing to kill the Op-Center series before he would give “another dollar” to King and describing her in terms that devoted family man Jack Ryan would never have uttered about the mother of his children.
Welcome to the Hooker Prize – in honor of Elliot Spitzer and his fall from grace in a New York minute, AbeBooks.com has compiled a list of 10 recommended non-fiction reads about hookers, madams, high-class callgirls and prostitutes. Prostitution, of course, is the oldest profession in the world and has fascinated readers for centuries. Since the 1970s, there has been a wealth of memoirs from ‘ladies of the night’ so here’s the literary lowdown on the callgirl culture.
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.’”).
Hey, we didn’t say it – but Ruth Franklin does in The New Republic. That and more.
From the article:
If any reader still managed to pick up Suite Francaise without knowing that the book’s author died at Auschwitz, he or she would have learned it in the second sentence of the jacket copy. And the novel’s handsome editorial apparatus includes Némirovsky’s notes “on the situation in France” and a selection of correspondence, including her husband’s desperate letters to friends on her behalf after her arrest. The implication is clear: Suite Francaise, aside from its literary value, is to be regarded as an authentic, even numinous document miraculously salvaged from the ashes of the great catastrophe, as poignant and as prophetic as the diary of Anne Frank, to which it has been frequently, and nonsensically, compared. In the words of one reporter, the novel is “a classic Holocaust story by an author who would not live to see her work published.”
You just know there’s a “but” coming, don’t you?
The truth is, this was spin. Worse, it was a fraud. The fraud could be perpetrated because very few readers in our day know anything about Irène Némirovsky. Though she published more than a dozen novels between 1928 and 1942, only a few were translated into English. Even in France, where Némirovsky was extremely successful – so successful, as Jonathan Weiss reports in his immensely clarifying biography, that her income eventually outpaced that of her husband, a banker – her work was out of print until recently. Certainly very few readers would still remember David Golder, her first novel and, until Suite Francaise, her greatest success.
[…]
The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes. As Weiss’s important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky’s stories of corrupt Jews – some of them even have hooked noses, no less! – appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles.
Last December, Quillblog noted a spat between Toronto Small Press Book Fair organizers Myna Wallin and Halli Villegas and one of the event’s founders, poet Stuart Ross. The controversy stemmed from comments posted by Ross on his blog criticizing Wallin and Villegas for poorly promoting the November event. The debate was then continued in various online forums, becoming increasingly personal and nasty.
According to a recent article on the website Reading Toronto, the disagreement has taken an even uglier turn, with Villegas and Wallin threatening legal action against Ross.
Wallin and Villegas allege that Ross has engaged in a campaign of “defamation of character and interference in our professional lives.” They also claim that Ross has conducted a “two-month campaign of personal and public harassment and defamation” and assert that he has done so “with clear intent to ruin our professional reputations.”
This information has come to light in a singularly unusual manner: it was made public by Wallin and Villegas themselves in a mass email to the Lexiconjury discussion group. Inevitably, their email has subsequently achieved a far wider circulation by being forwarded by various members of the group to parties beyond it.
The article is exhaustive and fleshes out some of the issues at play regarding free speech and community-building. And it illustrates how a whole lot of people are in a tizzy over the affair (just read the comments sections here and here). This bit, toward the end of the article, gives you a good sense of the escalating stakes in the debate:
In the absence of any substantiation of these very serious allegations, it is unclear how much Wallin and Villegas are demanding Ross recant, and how much control they now seek to dictate not only over his involvement in small press publishing and the Small Press Book Fair, but over his writing career – his blog, his widely read “Hunkamooga” column, his past and forthcoming poetry books and novel, his participation in literary events, his work as a literary editor and instructor, his collegial and personal relations – more broadly. Given the duration and extent of Wallin and Villegas’ campaign against Ross, it is unclear how much further they intend to go – or how Ross might respond upon provocation.
The latest salvos in the Amis/Eagleton polemic come from the increasingly rancorous novelist himself, who penned an earnest rebuttal in Saturday’s Guardian – “No, I am not a racist,” pleads the headline – and then glibly ran his mouth at a debate on Monday night. At the talk at Manchester University, where Amis and Eagleton both teach, Amis revisted the incendiary subject that got him into hot water in the first place – namely, the discovery of an alleged Islamist plot against the U.K. in August 2006.
At a debate at Manchester University, where the novelist is head of creative writing, he told a packed auditorium that only a machine would not have experienced “retaliatory urges” upon learning in August last year of the alleged plot to bomb transatlantic aircraft, in which, Amis said, 3,000 people could have died.
“There should be from every corner of the west a permanent factory siren of disgust for these actions,” he told students, staff and members of the public, including Afzal Khan, the first Muslim to be lord mayor of Manchester. He acknowledged Muslim efforts “to put their house in order” were made more difficult by the jihadis’ “monopoly on intimidation”.
Upon closer inspection, Amis seems to apologize in advance for the outburst in the Saturday piece, where he advises readers never to take a novelist at his word. Sort-of quoting Nabokov, he writes, “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished man of letters, I talk like an idiot.”
So we’re likely to hear from Amis again, in considered prose, given that he continues to speak like an idiot.
But there was less assent when he went on to speak of a “distorted sympathy” towards Palestine. “I have sympathy for Israel. It’s not nothing to have six million of your number murdered in central Europe in the last century. Don’t you think that this has had a psychological effect on this race or religion, or whatever you want to call the Jews?
“Palestinians have never suffered anything as remotely terrible as that. There is an inexplicable numbness about Israel.”
In a world where terrorists can strike anytime, anywhere, eternal vigilance is a must. This is why we must applaud the initiative of a Cairns, Australia, bouncer who, according to this story in The Independent, kicked a man out of a pub for reading Richard Flanagan’s novel The Unknown Terrorist. (The novel, by the way, is about a woman who is wrongly identified as a terrorist.)
You might say this is the inevitable result of post-9/11 paranoia; you might even say that no self-respecting terrorist would be dancing in a pub and reading a book with the word “terrorist” in the title – but that’s exactly what they want you to think! It’s called reverse psychology.
Some other suspect books to look out for: Boom, Bust and Echo by David K. Foot, Crash by J.G. Ballard, No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror by H.P. Lovecraft, Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier, and The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor.
Feel free to suggest your own suspect books in the comments section – if we are to defeat these casual reading terrorists, we must all do our part!
The New York Times is reporting that Jessica Seinfeld, the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has been having to field accusations of plagiarism relating to her new cookbook, Deceptively Delicious, a guide for parents of picky eaters.
[…] a number of readers posting on Amazon.com and Oprah.com and other Web sites have pointed out some similarities between Ms. Seinfeld’s book, which was published this month by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, and another cookbook published by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, in April.
That book, The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine, who is not a celebrity, also suggests that parents purée healthy foods like spinach and sweet potatoes and hide them in childhood favorites like macaroni and cheese or brownies.
Those sorts of similarities, the article suggests, are about as damning as it gets, which isn’t all that damning, if you ask us. Haven’t parents been using those techniques for centuries? And though Missy Chase Lapine is described as “not a celebrity,” she is the former publisher of Eating Well magazine, which means she’s not exactly a starving nobody.
The weird part of all this, however, is that no one involved is officially accusing Ms. Seinfeld.
“Honestly I can’t speculate, and I’m not going to accuse anyone of anything,” Ms. Lapine said. “I suppose it’s possible it’s a coincidence.”
Nevertheless, the speculation was enough to get Mr. Seinfeld himself on the phone with the Times reporter:
“Let’s be realistic — my wife isn’t in this for the money or the publicity.” He added, “I really don’t think we have another Watergate here.”
Possibly the most vital – and certainly the most gratuitous – debate in American letters is occurring almost entirely under the radar.
The controversy surrounds a body of work referred to variously as ghetto, urban, or street literature, which describes a genre directed at African-American readers that is often poorly written, barely edited, and glorifies crime, sex, and violence. Here’s how New York Times editorial writer and author Nick Chiles reacted when he encountered a sizeable display of ghetto lit titles at a Borders Books in Georgia in 2005:
On shelf after shelf, in bookcase after bookcase, all that I could see was lurid book jackets displaying all forms of brown flesh, usually half-naked and in some erotic pose, often accompanied by guns and other symbols of criminal life. I felt as if I was walking into a pornography shop, except in this case the smut is being produced by and for my people, and it is called “literature.”
But as Chiles also acknowledges, ghetto lit sells – in fact, he says that this was “one of the largest collections of books by black authors that I’ve ever seen outside an independent black bookstore.” The genre is so popular that mainstream publishers are jumping on the bandwagon. But as Chiles points out, the fear is that ghetto lit titles are being published at the expense of books by serious black writers.
The debate was reignited on Oct. 3 when bestselling author Terry McMillan sent a scathing e-mail to Karen Hunter – co-author of a number of controversial ghetto lit titles, including Confessions of a Video Vixen and Pimpology – and two Simon & Schuster executives, who recently launched an imprint catering to black readers with Hunter at its helm. McMillan castigated the trio for publishing “exploitative, destructive, racist, egregious, sexist, base, tacky, poorly-written, unedited, degrading books,” which she says are particularly demeaning to women.
Adding to the intrigue, the screed dovetails into an attack on McMillan’s ex-husband Jonathan Plummer, whose fictionalized memoir of their split was co-authored by Hunter. (Coincidentally, Plummer served as inspiration for McMillan’s mega-bestseller How Stella Got Her Groove Back.) But as author Amy Alexander argues in The Nation, McMillan’s personal ire is justifiable:
I am not at all put off by the fact that McMillan’s busted marriage helped push her over this particular edge. Far be it from me to judge any woman who feels she’s been done wrong by a man, and who then takes those bad feelings and turns them toward activism…. McMillan performed a public service by exposing the large pool of published dreck directed at black readers.
(For more background on the debate, Alexander’s article is a good place to start.)
A murder trial currently under way in Poland suggests that there is definitely such a thing as too much author research. The defendant, according to an article in The Guardian, is 33-year-old writer Krystian Bala, and police say his popular novel Amok mirrors the facts of a real-life killing much too closely to be coincidence.
In Amok, Bala describes how the man was tied up in a similar fashion to [the victim] Dariusz J, with his hands bound behind his back and round his wrists and neck. The murdered man, the owner of a small advertising agency, had also been tortured.
Bala has vigorously denied having inside knowledge of the killing. He says he was simply an avid reader of the press reports and that he has been framed to cover up for what he described as a “bungled” police investigation.
It sounded like a tenuous accusation to us at first, but then the Guardian piece goes on to mention that the victim was a close friend of Bala’s ex-wife, and that, four days after the murder, Bala sold the victim’s mobile phone over the internet. Creepy.
July 31, 2007 | 10:12 AM | By Megan Grittani-Livingston
Potterphiles, you can breathe a sigh of relief, because The Onion has your back with an important spoiler warning. Apparently, that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book gives away the ending of everything and everyone to do with Potter!
“The whole experience is completely ruined for me,” said 25-year-old fan Ethan Clay, adding that the book builds up suspense, and then, without warning, gives away vital, plot-altering information. “The least [Rowling] could have done was put a spoiler alert or something on the front cover.”
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.
Via the Canadian Magazines blog, we discover that a number of lawyers are hot under the robes about an interview in the newest issue of Maclean’s with Philip Slayton, author of Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada’s Legal Profession, published this month by Viking Canada.
The interview, entitled “Lawyers Are Rats,” has prompted a heated reply from the Canadian Bar Association, which has posted a statement on its web site that accuses the magazine of painting “a distorted, one-sided and sensationalized picture of the legal profession.”
Quillblog can certainly understand the CBA’s anger – as far as we know, this is the first time ever that anyone, anywhere, has suggested that lawyers are anything other than morally upright citizens who want nothing more than to teach the world to sing.
Because there is nothing more important going on in the world than the drunken, drugged-up antics of a talented young actress barely out of her teens, below is a version of Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL,” adapted specially for Ms. Lohan. “I’ve seen the best actresses of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, drunk,/driving through the streets of Beverly Hills at dawn looking for a place to crash.”
Weirdly enough, or perhaps appropriately enough, it ends up being kind of sympathetic.
September 20, 2006 | 12:00 AM | By Cassandra Drudi
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?
The east London borough of Tower Hamlets is up in arms again against Booker-nominated author Monica Ali and her novel Brick Lane. Now that a movie’s in the making, they’re really pissed.
According to a Guardian story, “a community action group in Tower Hamlets has launched a campaign to stop production” of the movie. “In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing ‘pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes’ and of containing ‘a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community.’”
Three years ago, community advocates came down hard on the book, saying that it “portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a ‘despicable insult.’”
Brick Lane Traders’ Association chair and sweetshop proprietor Abdus Salique is leading the charge, and has circulated a petition “to put pressure on the council to halt Ruby Films’ adaptation, already in production in a London studio, and calling on ‘all right-thinking people to join in preventing this attack on good social, ethical standard and idea [sic].’”
He says, “Nobody can come with a camera make a film about that book here. She [Ali] has imagined ideas about us in her head. She is not one of us, she has not lived with us, she knows nothing about us, but she has insulted us.” The fact that the book is a work of fiction makes no difference to Salique; he feels that the book isn’t, in fact, fiction and that Ali’s claims that it is are “lies.” Says Salique: “She wanted to be famous at the cost of a community.”
He then goes on to claim that community groups prevented Ali from snagging the Booker and that, if filming should go ahead in their neck of the woods, there could be trouble. “The community feels strongly about this. We are not going to let it happen … Young people are getting very involved with this campaign. They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me.”
Claudia Kalindjian, a spokesperson for Ruby Films, the company producing the film, says that they wouldn’t have gone ahead with the movie if they had thought the source material racist.
India will be the guest of honour at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair. To represent its massive, booming literature and publishing industry, India will be sending a somewhat meagre delegation of 33 writers. The Literary Saloon directs us to Outlook India’s Bibliofile column, which says that the selection “made by a steering committee headed by the secretary, HRD ministry and included other quasi-government organs like the Sahitya Akademi” has inevitably ruffled a few feathers among those many thousands of writers left off the list.
In order to help smooth things over, India’s National Book Trust has “sent 14 semi-finalists to the Leipzig Fair in March. Another lot will go in September. As further consolation prizes, it also sent a list of 150 books – an awesome balancing act of regional quotas — to German publishers to print before the fair. There was a bribe too: a subsidy of Rs2 a word for every book they published. But the ‘finicky’ Germans didn’t bite.”
According to Bibliofile, the NBT will also be screening a number of Indian movies at the Fair. Here’s hoping the ‘wet sari’ look takes off in Germany this fall.
The controversy over Kaavya Viswanathan’s plagiarism keeps picking up speed, so here’s a quick recap. The Harvard student scored a $500,000 advance for her debut chicklit novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, but that book has now been shown to be suspiciously similar to two previous chicklit novels by Megan McCafferty. The echoes range from plot points and character types down to the specific wording in no less than 45 passages. Viswanathan has admitted to being a fan of McCafferty’s work, but says she must have “internalized” the other author’s novels and that any similarities are unintentional. McCafferty’s publisher, Crown, isn’t buying it, but Viswanathan’s, Little, Brown, is standing by her for now.
The twist is that Viswanathan produced her book in concert with a book packager, 17th Street Productions, which shares copyright on the novel and no doubt took a big piece of that half-million advance. The firm is known best for producing the Sweet Valley High series.
In a piece on the Slate website, British author John Barlow provides his own account of the strange experience of trying to produce a novel with a book packager – and the packager in question is none other than 17th Street. “[J]ust how do you write a novel by committee?” asks Barlow. “Answer: with a great deal of pleasure. We would gather on the phone, me in Europe, they in New York, and chew the fat for hours about development, character, plot digressions, key moments…. I imagined this was how prime-time TV gets written: lots of witty, divergent opinions slowly converging on a highly predictable and uninspiring concept.”
Sweet justice! A London court has ruled, in not so many words, that Dan Brown and Random House are free to continue making grillions of dollars off The Da Vinci Code. Also, the release of the movie won’t be delayed, so Ron Howard can sleep easily tonight, although In Other Media has a feeling that he sleeps easily most nights. Sarah Lyall of The New York Times filed her report from London earlier this morning: “In issuing his judgment, Justice Peter Smith said that Mr. Brown did indeed rely on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in writing a section of the book, but he said that Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, the two authors of earlier book, had failed to prove what the central theme of their book was and thus failed to prove that Mr. Brown had lifted it from them. In fact, the judge said, the earlier book ‘does not have a central theme as contended by the claimants: it was an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation working back from The Da Vinci Code.‘”
The American Library Association has released its “10 Most Challenged Books of 2005″ list, and though it’s comforting that such immoral tomes as Of Mice and Men and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have finally been deemed acceptable by all of America’s library-card holders, there are still a few vintage titles on the list that might raise a few eyebrows. To make the list, a book must have generated at least one written request in the past year that it be removed from the library system. Such requests inevitably arise from a concern with the book’s sexual content or use of bad language, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone with a basic cable TV subscription could still be calling for the removal of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (third on the list) or Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, which placed fourth. The most challenged book was Robert H. Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, and Sexual Health for its “homosexuality, nudity, sex education, religious viewpoint, abortion, and being unsuited to age group.”
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.”
The Tyee has a piece suggesting that Michael Crichton’s State of Fear – an action thriller based on the premise that environmentalists are misinformed at best and downright sinister at worst – could herald a whole new genre of “propaganda” novel. From that opening, though, the piece weirdly segues into a discussion of product placement on TV shows like American Idol and 24, before getting back to books by suggesting some hypothetical projects that could be written with corporate sponsorship in mind. “For the forest industry client: a romance novel in which a beautiful, committed environmentalist falls in love with a logger. They clash at first, but soon she learns that people working in the forest industry are the true environmentalists as they live on and care for the land.”
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.”
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.)
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 interviewe
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