James Frey's admission last week that he made up details of his life in his best-selling book "A Million Little Pieces" - after the Smoking Gun Web site stated that he "wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states"' - created a furor about the decision by the book's publishers, Doubleday, to sell the volume as a memoir instead of a novel.
It is not, however, just a case about truth-in-labeling or the misrepresentations of one author: After all, there have been plenty of charges about phony or inflated memoirs in the past, most notably about Lillian Hellman's 1973 book "Pentimento." It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth...
Read the full and insightful article at
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/18/travel/truth.php#
ATP
It is not, however, just a case about truth-in-labeling or the misrepresentations of one author: After all, there have been plenty of charges about phony or inflated memoirs in the past, most notably about Lillian Hellman's 1973 book "Pentimento." It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth...
Read the full and insightful article at
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/18/travel/truth.php#
ATP
