All the Lies That Aren't His Life

I haven't gloated so far about James Frey's misfortune at having been caught in so many lies in his memoir/novel A Million Little Pieces. It is nice to see a guy who was a jerk about how "real" he supposedly was in comparison to Dave Eggers get his comeuppance. I never did buy his yarn, because it seemed like Frey's persona fit so neatly with the story he was trying to tell--a smart-but-alienated suburban student suffers a tragedy that turns him into a badass-druggie before he finds redemption in rehab. The slimy bathroom details of Frey's book aside, how many crime novels, movies-of-the-week, Hallmark Hall of Fame presentations, and ABC afterschool specials fit this general narrative arc? (Take the drugs out of the picture, and it closely matches the plot of I Accuse My Parents, an addlepated good-suburban-kid-gone-bad story that became a popular MST3K episode.) The way I figure it, Frey picked the narrative first, then fashioned a persona to match it.

This may explain why A Million Little Pieces never made it as a literary novel. When the protagonist fits the story too neatly, readers will lose the illusion that the protagonist's decisions (or the untamable, contingent forces of life) drive story events. They'll feel, instead, that the protagonist is merely a part of the author's prefabricated construct--a widget built to the author's specifications. Again, that's fine in genre fiction, which we read more to enjoy the unfolding of the plot than to explore the existence of a person, but it doesn't work for the kind of book Frey aimed to write. Editors, reading the book as a novel, probably found it too pat, too shopworn a tale, to capture their interest. And it's why, as nonfiction, the book raised so many questions. Perceptive readers sensed the fiction in the nonfiction, even if they didn't bother to check up on Frey.

Now, if Frey wanted to do some literary non-fiction, I've got a pitch for him. Why not do a book, film feature, or documentary, in the style of Sherman's March, Adaptation, Out of Sheer Rage, where Frey, a failed fiction writer, looks back in his life and transforms his unremarkable, vanilla suburban experiences into an exciting, page-turning, baditudinous, graphically violent "memoir" that fools Oprah Winfrey and brings him riches the truth could never earn? The theme could be "I can't believe people really think life is really this neat, much less that they'd fill my bank account for confirming their belief."

Check out The Onion's take here.