Like your Aunt Mary, that guy next to you on the plane, and the punk rock chick at the hair salon, I have been reading "A Million Little Pieces," a memoir that basically reads like an Upton Sinclair book about drug-induced vomiting.
As you might have heard by now, the book was
skewered this week by The Smoking Gun in an expose that's quickly getting national attention. I won't linger on the investigation, which seems to be thorough and appropriately biting. If you've read the book, the TSG article should be required reading. If you haven't, I don't know if you'll get much out of it.
Now I'm at a strange crossroads. I've been reading this book on my breaks for the past two weeks, and I'm about three quarters of the way through. It's good, but I can't quite see myself finishing it now, knowing that it's probably a lot of horseshit.
I'm likely experiencing the same emotions that many of his millions of readers did: Defensiveness at first ("well, of course he changed up the story a bit from real life...that's to be expected), then reluctant skepticism ("I guess I did wonder how he got on an airplane unconscious, covered in vomit and with a hole in his cheek...") and finally resignation ("And he happened to befriend a mob boss? Whose adopted father was gunned down the day the mob boss was going into rehab? WTF?")
I've never trusted narrative memoirs, which of course have been huge best-sellers since "Angela's Ashes." I loved Ashes, but I just have trouble believing that one writer can remember so much about when he was a little boy.
I even felt the same inklings of doubt with "Devil in the White City," a brilliant book that (while not a memoir) purports to be straight nonfiction based entirely on historical documents. Here's the author's note from the intro of Devil:
In the following pages I tell the story of these men and this event, but I must insert here a notice: However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir or other written document.
I added the emphasis because that section is tantamount to a wink at the reader, one that you don't notice until you've gone back after finishing the book. Author Erik Larson vividly describes the thoughts and actions of people who died alone and were found only as charred bones. Why bother? Well, it makes good freading, something that "Million Little Pieces" author James Frey seems to have learned himself.
As a journalist, I was occasionally hit with a dilemma about a story that seemed a bit too good. There weren't quite enough records to back up someone's story, but why would they lie, right? Truth is stranger than fiction, right?
With the crunch of deadlines, I likely was responsible for printing several stories that deserved more thorough investigation. I often focused such energies on politicians, who have nice, easy paper trails to follow. But what about the others?
I still have concerns about one in particular...
Something about
this story that I assigned and edited always sat funny with me. Editors develop a spider sense of sorts for things that don't seem to add up. This story was a run-of-the-mill tale of a pastor's work helping victims of Katrina in New Orleans. The first thing that bothered me was that he mentioned helping rape victims, and the story was running at a time when people were challenging the stories of rapes in the Superdome. Here's an excerpt from our story:
More than once, Nelson and his crew delivered babies while standing in raw sewage inside a triage center just steps from the Superdome. Where the National Football League has hosted numerous Super Bowl championships, Nelson saw women, too weak to move, urinate on their defibrillators as he prayed for them.
Although authorities are still attempting to determine if people had been raped inside the Superdome, Nelson said his team treated a few. "There were so many rape victims, and we had to turn (most all) of them away because they had life-damaging, but not life-threatening wounds," Nelson said.
I'm not saying any of this is untrue, but it just seems....I don't know, a bit too much for real life. Couldn't you take a few steps out of the sewage to deliver the babies? The story also mentioned this little anecdote:
And yet, Nelson saw signs of hope and humor inside the stadium home of the New Orleans Saints.
One hurricane survivor, wary of the lawlessness pervading throughout the stadium, posted a sign.
"Don't even think about it. I'm sleeping with an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer," the sign read.
The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a picture of this same sign, except it was on the side of a building across town. The reporter checked his notes and confirmed that the pastor had said it was in the Superdome. Weird...
I talked briefly with the reporter and copy chief about how to handle this, and we agreed that it required an intensive set of follow-up interviews and scrutiny. But we were a small paper with tremendously limited resources. In the end, we had to move on to the other 100 stories waiting to be written. But I still feel that spider sense tingling, and I feel responsible for not doing more.
Now, going back to "Million Little Pieces," the question of the hour is WWOD. What will Oprah do? Her choice of the memoir for her book club made it an international sensation. What if it's little more than an embellished lie? His story is one of scoffing at the 12 Steps and instead trying to out-tough addiction. What if that actually hurts or kills those who are turning to it for inspiration?
Something tells me this storm is just starting to crackle.
