Off topic (slightly): A Million Little Pieces of Excrement
I'm going to pretend that getting named to Oprah's Book Club is an award unto itself and offer some thoughts on James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces." Frey, as you probably know, has come under fire from thesmokinggun.com for essentially making up his memoir of life as an abject addict (the publisher has since agreed to refund money to those who bought the book and feel ripped off).
Which I don't get -- if you know just a little about his book, you know sundry storylines are dubious -- for example, it begins with Frey, waaaay messed up, on a plane he didn't even knew he boarded. Most airline policies, for many years, are to not allow such inebriated passengers to board -- they'll come up with any excuse, and Frey's description of himself -- bloodied, etc. -- would seem to fall into such parameters. Also: While most people may not expect lurid bios of this sort to be utter nonsense (but think about it -- if these people are this messed up, how can they lucidly recall their ignoble pasts?) -- I personally, actually, appear in one: I play David, the Dallas Times Herald Music Critic, in Elizabeth Wurtzel's bestseller "Prozac Nation," and nothing in the three or so pages in which I'm mentioned actually happened. (I come offf looking pretty good, relatively speaking, in the book, in case you're wondering, though my dialogue feels very stilted; I may be the only character in the book Wurtzel didn't sleep with -- I'll leave it to you to guage my dismay in this arena.)
The point is, these people write books simply to get a rise out of the very conventional humans who review such books, and anyone who thinks otherwise is touchingly deluded. Think of Katherine Harrison's The Kiss, in which she elucidated her sex with her father -- is this something you want to share with America, or something that'll sell books.
Bad behavior sells; merely moderately bad behavior is the norm and none of us care. When Frey appeared on the utterly clueless Larry King tonight, a recurring theme was: Memoirs are a relatively new art form. Hmmm, if you say so, though I recall reading "The Confessions of St. Augustine" two decades back. Which, if memory serves, was written a least a millenium ago and included accounts of sex in a church by a man who became an icon of the Catholic Church. Everything old is lurid again.
