Edward Wyatt will not let up in the James Frey story.
In today’s New York Times he skewers Sean McDonald, Frey’s editor (who has moved from Nan Talese’s imprint at Doubleday to Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin USA, but remains Frey’s editor), for tellling different stories at different times about Frey and the veracity of his tale.
This is the biggest sensation in the publishing world since the Clifford Irving hoax, which happened more than 30 years ago. Likely, this one went into heavy rotation in the news cycle because it involved Oprah Winfrey, at whose altar many worship, calling Larry King, who celebrities go to when they want to repair their damaged images, during the live airing of his interview with Frey (and his mom!).
Oprah’s January 26 performance, which aired at the regularly scheduled time, was followed by a half-hour segment that few saw and even fewer heard about. But it made clear that Oprah’s finger-pointing was a performance.
“After the Show” she was less sure of herself and less steely–particularly when the first audience member stood up and said he didn’t care how much Frey had lied. He (the audience member) was a former addict and he was a hundred percent behind Frey.
For offering the best entertainment packaged with the least amount of useful information, the burning-at-the-stake of James Frey wins the Best Infotainment Blip of the Month award.
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[...] Most of the editors interviewed for the piece indicate they will be more cautious and more skeptical about their authors after the recent scandals involving Frey, JT Leroy, and Nasdijj (the three were lumped together by most of the reporters who covered the story, although the latter two were outright frauds whereas Frey–and his editor–merely lacked scruples. I’ve written about this here and here.) The “gentleman’s trade” notion of book publishing inherent in this argument (”we trust people”) is, of course, outdated by about forty years. The best account of the demise of the book business was written by retired publishing “mandarin” Jason Epstein, these days best-known as the husband of disgraced (and, shamefully, railroaded by her powerful enemies) New York Times reporter Judy Miller. [...]
[...] Robert Hughes reports in the WSJ on how the memoir genre in book publishing is faring in the aftermath of the James Frey controversy (which was the subject of my first post). The genre has been around for a long time and will continue, he concludes. He muses on the reasons for its popularity: [...]
[...] Back in February, when I started publishing this blog, my first post was about the Frey affair. Oprah’s flaying of Frey got the (first and only) Best Infotainment Blip of the Month award; it was breathtaking television. [...]
[...] Frey will lie low for a while, and within a few years he’ll have reinvented himself. (If his experience as Oprah’s whipping boy doesn’t set back his recovery.) [...]
[...] I’ve only awarded one of these before (in my very first post: to Oprah vs. James Frey), so today is a red-letter day. [...]
[...] was so entertaining that it inspired me to start blogging (he was the subject of my first post), has come to terms with his publisher, and together they have agreed to make whole those readers who were misled by Frey’s dramatically enhanced memoir A Million Little Pieces. [...]
[...] Which, by the way, I mentioned in my very first blog post, “As the Page Turns.” [...]
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