Word: frey
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...enjoyment of reality TV. Fans watch Laguna Beach, for instance, not for facts about LC, Kristin and Stephen's lives but for a gorgeously shot, engrossing story of the envy, entanglements and casual cruelties of rich, hot teenagers. That view of reality TV may veer close to the James Frey "essential truth" defense, but, let's face it, Blind Date does not have quite the same literary aspirations...
...VERACITY OF MEMOIR IS A HOT TOPIC, ESPECIALLY AFTER THE DOUBTS ABOUT JAMES FREY'S A MILLION LITTLE PIECES (OPRAH'S PREVIOUS SELECTION). I don't want to speak of that controversy. I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful...
What's going on here? Did Frey lie to boost his story's drama and his own street cred? TIME was able to check some of the Smoking Gun's findings, and came to the same conclusion. For example, Marianne Sanders, 62, the mother of the girl who died, says that she and her husband recognize Frey but that he was not a good friend of their daughter's and that he wasn't even remotely blamed for the accident that killed her in 1986 (another girl, whom Frey doesn't mention, also died in the accident). "We knew...
...pleasing, rounded endings they're used to in fiction. To get those effects in nonfiction, writers sometimes cut corners--the factual kind. "If you want to have something that can be sold as based on a true story," Coffey says, "you're going to run into guys like James Frey who are embellishing with techniques that are considered a gift in fiction writing but apparently a sin in a memoir...
...defense of his book, Frey invoked the fundamentally subjective nature of the memoir. "It's an individual's perception," he said to King, "my recollection." And he's right. Any memoir is unavoidably filtered through the author's memory and feelings and the inherently impressionistic nature of any literary medium. But before we get lost in an epistemological fog, let's not forget that there's a difference between unavoidable distortions and willful deceptions. Some falsehoods come with the territory of the memoirist; others must be deliberately imported into it. That's a distinction that memoirist Mary Karr, author...