Thursday, January 19, 2006

James Frey's Memory Is Really Bad

And I'm still finding more good gems about James Frey and his book of lies . . . er, memoir, A Million Little Pieces.
I think someone could collect all the articles written about the incident and have quite the encyclopedia. I will digress and save us all some boredom. While Frey may believe he's raking in the dough by staying in the public eye, he's not gaining any fans in the literary world. Nan Talese (his editor) scolded him publicly in this article:

Observer story

QUOTE: On Monday, Jan. 16, Nan Talese was on vacation in Bermuda with her husband, the nonfiction writer Gay Talese. It was Ms. Talese’s imprint at Doubleday that published James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces in hardcover, and she had something to add to the still-evolving controversy.

“When the manuscript of A Million Little Pieces was received by us at Doubleday, it was received as nonfiction, as a memoir,” said Ms. Talese by phone. “Throughout the whole process of publication, it had always been a memoir, and for the first year and a half it was on sale, it was always a memoir with no disputation. It was never once discussed as fiction by me or anyone in my office.”

Ms. Talese’s statement appears to contradict Mr. Frey, who has said that it was his publisher’s decision to foist A Million Little Pieces onto the public as a memoir rather than a novel, as he had originally written it. Just a few days ago, during an unrepentant appearance on Larry King Live, Mr. Frey said: “We initially shopped the book as a novel, and it was turned down by a lot of publishers as a novel or as a nonfiction book. When Nan Talese purchased the book, I’m not sure if they knew what they were going to publish it as. We talked about what to publish it as. And they thought the best thing to do was publish it as a memoir.”
END QUOTE

So, the end result? See the next post.

1 comment:

MarkFarley said...

We just moved the book to the Fiction section and the company is advising other stores to do the same.