Pajiba

Fucking EVERY memoir is embellished! Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. Who the fuck wants to read what the guy ate for gaddamn breakfast for 40 years?!

*ahem* Sorry. Evidently I still have a bit of residual annoyance at all the people who made Frey a pariah for doing what every other memoirist on the planet has been doing since the history of memoirs began.

Anyway. Aliens. Huh. "The Milhouse of filmmaking." Hahahah! Nice.

Just goes to show that Frey is a great fiction writer.

The drugs and CNN thing...my brain screamed Chez Pazienza. But he's not a douchebag. Right?

Anyhoo, I don't really care that Frey made stuff up in his memoir. I'm pretty sure that is routine for most memoirs. What I hate is Oprah flipping her shit about being fooled. Surely that wasn't the first memoir she had read? God, I hate Oprah.

finally! i totally liked the book too and didn't care if it was real or fake. i didn't read it for inspiration and barely realized it was supposed to be a true story. there. i just added no value with my comment except to say THANK YOU and I AGREE.

Shia LeBeouf desperately needs to be kidnapped by barbers so someone with an ounce of decency in them can destroy that godforsaken moustache.

I suppose Frey shouldn't have marketed his book as nonfiction when it was actually fiction, but there's no doubt that Joprah WinCarfrey overreacted.

It really annoys me that Oprah's opinion is law amongst her legions of rabid fans. I wonder how many of them read and liked Frey's book before she turned on him.

So you just keep on writing, James Frey. You show her that she's not the boss of you. SHE'S NOT THE BOSS OF YOU!!!!

I'm sorry . . . I LOVED a Million Little Pieces and that whole Frey vs. Oprah debacle is precisely why I started hating on Oprah.

She can suck it.

Posted by: Westcott at January 21, 2010 11:10 AM

My thoughts EXACTLY! Fuck Oprah.

Also Frey wrote another book, out of the vein of A Million Little Pieces & My Freind Leonard, called Bright Shiny Morning. Has anyone else read it? It is a fantastic book, and shows that Frey really is a great author It is really too bad the queen of all fucking media permanently put a grey cloud over the mans head.

I agree that Oprah's righteous indignation was unwarranted. I got especially irritated at her nitpicking the manor in which one of the characters died. Apparently, that person's name was changed and the way the person died was also changed. Does that make the person any less dead, their family any less sorrowful? Or does that make Oprah a jerk for not understanding he was protecting the identity of the deceased? Why would she insist on gory details about someone elses' misery? When does it stop being all about Oprah?

That being said, I agree that he was a liar for claiming it was a totally true story. All he needed to do was print the line: inspired by real events, names have been changed to protect the identities of individuals depicted in this book. Or something like that.

Agreed, with DeistBrawler: he was a macho jerk, particularly that bullshit about making himself have a beer after all that work and therapy to see if he could just have one and stop. Like, the rules of addiction and recovery don't apply to him because he is just such a Hard Guy. Whatever, if that really happened he'd be back to using so fast it wouldn't be funny. It mocks anyone who has really experienced the misery of addiction for the sake of his ego,and that really offends me.

Other than that, I actually enjoyed the book. Plowed right through it, if I remember correctly.

When Oprah lost her shit over A Million Little Pieces I was working in a chain bookstore. I was there alone one day when a woman called up and said that she had a hardcover copy of the book and was wondering what the return policy was. I told her the policy, asked how long she had had the book and what condition it was in, and then told her that in her situation we would not be able to refund her purchase. She condescendingly reminded me which book she was talking about, and wanted to know what the special policy was for that particular book, given -- you know -- the situation.

She did not ask me IF there was a special return policy for A Million Little Pieces. She assumed that there was one, because Oprah Had Spoken.

I told her we had no such special policy. Shocked, she demanded the number for Head Office. When I asked her to wait a moment while I retrieved it, well, that was the last straw. Angrily telling me to LEARN MY RIGHTS (wtf?) she hung up the phone.

I then went about my day.

I loved A Million Little Pieces as well. As for Oprah... I have this theory that Rachael Ray and Dr. Phil are physical manifestations of the contempt Oprah has for her audience. But that's just me.

Frey's still an asshole, did you look at his book? He basically turned himself into the ultimate badass, and fooled the whole damn country into thinking he was awesome in the flesh.