I don’t care if he more than stretched the truth.  Both books made an emotional impact on me for whatever reason you want to name.

Why is everyone picking on James Frey? I can think of hundreds of memoirs with more distortions than his has. And what about the Da Vinci code, a fictional book that is set in a factual world.

It’s okay to duistort history for artistic reasons but not your personal life. Get off his case!

I agree with the posting above that will power is not a useful way to battle addiction.  If you can do it with will power then you dont really need rehab, in fact your probably not an addict.  Which is great!!  Congrats!!  Do it with will power while you can, because it wont always be that way!!  An alcoholic or addict is one who has no control over there addiction, plain and simple.  Frey lied about so many things, its easy to see why he does not agree with the principles of AA.  It is a program of honesty, plain and simple.  If AA is not for you, so be it.  However, to claim that self will alone is sufficient to accomplish sobriety is absolutely irresponsible and it is a very dangerous statement to make.

I totally agree with Roger McKee O’Connor above!!

Kim: President Bush shares something in common with James Frey: lying. He lied us into the war and then excused himself by saying it was the “right” thing to do anyway—just as James Frey says his disregard of the truth doesn’t matter because the message of his book is the right one anyway.

As it happens, his message is not the right one. You cannot overcome an addiction through the power of your will. In order to make that argument, he had to lie. His book is a terrible disservice to those of us who actually have been through treatment for addictions, just as Bush dishonors the thousands of Americans who have been maimed or killed in Iraq. He celebrates their fight for freedom while cutting their benefits.

The truth really DOES matter.

I DO NOT BELIEVE FREY’S ACCOUNT OF HAVING DENTAL WORK DONE WITH NO ANASTHESIA.  I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT DENTISTS THINK OF THAT.

HE IS A COMPLETE LIAR.  A FRAUD.  HE CAN HURT PEOPLE WITH HIS LIES, PEOPLE WHO NEED HELP.

What underlying message?

If he lied about the cheek thing and about jail and hitting cops and fighting with cops and blacking out every day for a decade and lied about being involved in a tragic train fatality and being a bad boy in high school, if he distorted the Hazelden program and maybe even exaggerated his relationship with “Lilly” (how dramatically convenient that she committed suicide the day he got out of jail, even though he hasn’t yet substantiated that he was in jail) then how do you know he didn’t lie about being rock bottom as a kid and sobering up after Hazelden?

How do you know he wasn’t just a regular frat boy, a privileged kid with jetsetting parents who smoked a little dope and got drunk a little too often but was otherwise basically normal and exaggerated everything in his book and passed it off as nonfiction because he wanted a bestseller and wanted to make himself to look cool in a thuggish kind of way? How do you know for sure he stopped taking drugs? Maybe he still smokes a little weed now and then.

If he lied about part of it, he might have lied about all of it, putting just enough truth in the story to make it hard to disprove all of it.

The book is predictable by the fourth chapter and the word repetitions are tedious, tedious, tedious.

Read J. Stahl’s memoir instead. He’s a good writer.

Leave James Frey alone! Both his books are incredibly written and the underlying message in each of his books are what counts. Pick a bigger battle to fight like the war in Iraq and our asshole President George Bush. Make love not war. I think if you were to study any memoirs or novels written by numerous authors over the decades, I bet they to embellished different things in the book to make them more interesting and more important, everyone’s goal that is to make money. Thanks for your time!

So much for Frey’s “essential truth” and the idea of his dishonesty being vitimless (re the therapists speaking out for fear that F’s descriptions will scare people away from rehab)
-jb
http://memoirisnotfiction.blogspot.com/