A Million Little Lies

Time to chime in on the controversy over James Frey and his autobiographical rehab story "A Million Little Pieces". I've been recommending it for months and can't believe how often I've seen this on the news and in the papers over last couple weeks. I first heard of it on Oprah back in the Fall. I bought it read it loved it. Lori read it friends read it all loved it. Gave more copies out as gifts and bought the sequel "My Friend Leonard" for Lori at Christmas.

Many times while reading "Pieces" I thought, No way did this happen, and If this was a script I'd stop reading, if it was a movie I'd walk out. But it was a true story so I read on and loved it. This story proved truth is way stranger than fiction. When The Smoking Gun first came out saying Frey made up lots of shit in the book I didn't really care. I still enjoyed the book and knew there had to be exaggerations, there were two many details of days 20 years ago and these were memories of an alcoholic and drug addict. Of course it couldn't all be proven to be 100% accurate. All this stink came to light this month while I was reading My Friend Leonard and it has affected it. First this book just isn't as good as "Pieces", there were even more times I said to myself - I don't believe for a second this shit happened - much of that before this story hit the news.

I finally read the full investigation at TheSmokingGun.com and now the only thing I really believe in the books is that he is a shitty screenwriter. In "Leonard", Frey writes of years of trying to write books and screenplays and how they all sucked. Now we find out he tried to sell "Pieces" as a work of fiction and publishers all passed, then he made some changes and called it his non-fiction memoir and the rest is publishing history. He says in his books repeatedly, I am an alcoholic, a drug addict and a criminal. That is code for lying sack of shit who can only write cliche ridden melodramatic crappy movies.