Fact or Fiction: A Million Little Pieces

No doubt you've heard about A Million Little Pieces, the "memoir" by James Frey that recounts his crazy life as an alcoholic and drug addict and chronicles his way back to sobriety. Oprah Winfrey had him on her show claiming that he "kept her up for two nights" while she read his book. Now, there are rumors that this best seller isn't really a memoir and that some of the details in his book have been "embellished" to make it more exciting. TheSmokingGun.com, a Web site that seeks to provide the truth by publishing government and law enforcement documents, published a document that exposed Frey's book as fraud and the author as the "man who conned Oprah." What do you think?

I think:
I went out and bought this book after seeing it on Oprah (yes, I'm a groupie). I'm always looking for good books to read and all the ones I've read that Oprah suggests ARE GOOD. Now, with that said, I think it is deceptive to market a book as a memoir when pieces of it are fictional. That's just bad advertising, and in my opinion, Frey not only wanted a best selling book, he wanted to catapult himself to stardom since he's the "main character" in the book. He might have been better served (and could have avoided all this controversy) if he wrote the book based on his own story about a fictional character, not himself.

Oprah has finally broken her silence on the Larry King Show and said that the rumors are "much ado about nothing." But this doesn't really bode well for her in that it seems like she was duped by some con-artist. Either way, I intend to read the book I bought but I will now view it as fiction, not a memoir. And time will tell if this scandal actually helps or hurts Frey's book sales. If it helps, maybe it was a good strategy. If it hurts, I hope Frey enjoys his 15 seconds of fame while it lasts.