Liar Liar

James Frey's pants are on fire. His massive best selling "memoir," A Million Little Pieces, chronicles his drug-fueled crime-spree of a life before rehab, and, according to The Smoking Gun, it's chock full of fabrications. The guy even wrote himself into a tragic car accident that took the life of three fellow high school students. According to the Smoking Gun, Frey did not spend 3 months in jail reading Tolstoy as he claims, did not strike a cop (the cop in question apparently describes Frey as polite and cooperative), and did not get beaten up in jail by a man who was hired by cops to do it. Personally, I'm doubting the whole root canal without anesthetic episode too. Where on earth do you find a dentist who'll perform such a thing?You might ask why this alleged memoirist would fabricate stories that make him look like an even bigger a-hole than he obviously is. The answer is simple and cynical. A Million Little Pieces was a novel. He tried to sell it as such and, according to the Smoking Gun, none of the seventeen publishers he sent it to were interested. Undaunted, he retooled it into a "memoir" and voila! All that overblown, melodramatic crap about flamboyant sin and hard-won redemption was magically transformed from cloying pomposity to gut-wrenching "honesty." Talk about gaming the system.Life does not imitate art. Life is full of long boring pauses, pointless disappointments, unjust punishments and unearned rewards. It's in fiction where we assert the foundations of justice and meaning that make this often random and choatic life noble. James Frey has cheated the system by writing bad fiction then excusing it with the phony polish of truth. Shame. Shame. Shame.If you bought and read this travesty of a book, write his publisher, Random House, to demand a refund and an apology.