Truth and consequences

New York’s schizophrenic winter continues. Today it topped out at 61 degrees. It was so warm that I decided to wear only a sweatshirt and sweatpants over my workout clothes on the subway ride to the gym. Big mistake. By the time I left the gym at 8 pm, the temperature had dropped about 20 degrees and the wind was kicking up a fuss. Result: one frozen Joe Bones.

As I thaw out I have to confess I’m feeling a bit ornery tonight. I’ve got more things on my mind than I invited. I’ll try to unburden myself somewhat here.

I haven’t addressed any current events lately, so tonight I’ll weigh in on the hubbub over James Frey and his addiction-and-recovery memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.” The way I see it, James Frey is a fraud, a lying, opportunistic money-grubber and a disgrace to recovering substance abusers everywhere. He fabricated key passages of his book, much the way Hollywood spices up the narrative when turning a true story into a blockbuster movie. Hell, with “A Million Little Pieces,” all the elements of a blockbuster film are already there. Just add Nicolas Cage.

Yet because Oprah Winfrey endorsed this sorry tome and because of its subsequent best-seller status, Frey has received a pass from his publisher, Oprah and a large portion of the reading public. Supporters claim it’s the inspirational message of the book that matters, not that Mr. Frey bended and twisted his “truth” almost beyond recognition.

In a word: bullshit. I was happy and relieved to read Mary Karr’s essay, ”His So-Called Life,” in The New York Times. Karr is a poet and author of “The Liars’ Club,” one of the truly great—and true!— memoirs of the past 50 years.

In these passages from her essay, Ms. Karr nails the crux of the matter:

“Mr. Frey seems to have started with his perceived truth, and then manufactured events to support his vision of himself as a criminal. But how could a memoirist even begin to unearth his life's truths with fake events? At one point, I wrote a goodbye scene to show how my hard-drinking, cowboy daddy had bailed out on me when I hit puberty.

"When I actually searched for the teenage reminiscences to prove this, the facts told a different story: my daddy had continued to pick me up on time and make me breakfast, to invite me on hunting and fishing trips. I was the one who said no. I left him for Mexico and California with a posse of drug dealers, and then for college.

"This was far sadder than the cartoonish self-portrait I'd started out with. If I'd hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I'd never had to overcome—a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties—I wouldn't have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth.”

Amen, sister.

Daniel Henninger, of The Wall Street Journal, views the Frey controversy as but the latest manifestation of a culture that devolves while adhering to the ethos, "whatever works." I'll end this post with the final three paragraphs from his thought-provoking and somewhat depressing piece, "Oprah's Truth Is No Stranger to Fiction."

"What's a fraud now--and what's something else--has become a question worth pondering. We live in a world of reality TV shows, of newspaper photographs and fashion photos routinely 'improved' by the computer program Photoshop, of nightly news that pumps more emotion than fact into its version of public events such as Hurricane Katrina, hyper-real TV commercials manipulated with computers, the rise of 'interpretive' news, fake singers, fake breasts, fake memoirs. Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York described this world as 'always at the edge of falsehood' and so people come to tolerate it 'as part of the overall media buzz of their lives.'

"He's right. But there is a political dimension to this, which many of what are no doubt politically liberal writers upset at James Frey and Doubleday ought to consider. Before all this, most people operated from a common personal standard, a broadly held superstructure of right and wrong, integrity and dishonesty, which they probably learned in Sunday school. You can see and hear it in hundreds of old Hollywood movies. 'The Maltese Falcon,' written by Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, is full of this moral tension and resolving clarity.

"We all know those widely shared categories were broken and blurred the past 38 years, leading to terrible political fights between social conservatives and liberal liberators over disintegrating standards of personal behavior. Welcome to what it has wrought: The mass marketers and their accepting publics are skipping past the politics and simply pocketing the value added in the new controlling value--whatever 'works' for us personally, no matter how meretricious. It's hardly James Frey's fault that the culture really is in a million little pieces."