The Trouble With Memoirs

As does Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, 'Tis and this year's Teacher Man. "I ran into all of this questioning and disbelief," he says, "and nobody was able to trip me up on any of the facts of my life." He, too, is reluctant to resort to high-level metaphysics to steer a course between fact and fiction. "It's like having commentary at a football game. There's the guy who gives you all of the statistics and tells you what you're looking at. Then there's one who provides color. I think the memoir writer is doing both."

Frey's second line of defense is a little more formidable. As he put it on Larry King, "the emotional truth is there" in his book. He means that whatever the bookkeepers and muckrakers turn up, his story has a psychological power that makes its factual status more or less moot. Millions of people, some of them addicts, read the book and were deeply moved. Frey's readings are mob scenes. Are you really going to make a federal case out of where you shelve him in the bookstore?

But that just raises the question, If it's not factual, why didn't Frey publish A Million Little Pieces as fiction? By claiming that his story is literally true, Frey endows it with a heightened immediacy and an emotional force that it would have lacked as a novel. In effect, he borrowed a little extra emotional oomph from his trusting readers, who treated his book as lived experience, a receipt for real dues paid by a real person.

That's not trivial. If Frey wasn't entitled to that immediacy and that force--if he stole that oomph rather than earned it--well, that's cheating. Frey originally shopped the book to publishers as a work of fiction. How does that not set off anybody's alarm bells?

But step back a bit from the melee, and you can see a different picture, one that's easier to sympathize with. Whatever its facts are, A Million Little Pieces has moments of great and indisputable honesty, moments when Frey is willing to show himself looking ridiculous and unpleasant and petty and even cowardly. Here's one of them: "Lying became part of my life," he writes about his years as a drug-addicted college student. "I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something."

Nobody questions that Frey was an alcoholic and a drug addict. And one of the habits addicts pick up is bending and breaking the truth on a regular, routine basis. If you look at the distortions in Frey's book not as acts of cynical calculation or self-aggrandizement but as symptoms of his disease, they have a pathos to them. If Frey is still lying, if he can't face his life as he lived it, he's not whole yet. Redemption is a wonderful thing, but it's possible that the man whose life became A Million Little Pieces may not have quite put himself back together again.