WHEN FICTION MASQUERADES AS TRUTH

The fact that author James Frey made up parts of his memoir is
shocking enough. What's more surprising, though, is that people are
defending these lies without regard for the real danger that lurks
when a reader is betrayed.

There's a word for tales that aren't true. It's "fiction."

This bit of semantics, however, seems to have gotten trampled in the
battle over James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces. An alleged
tale of his life as an Alcoholic, drug Addict and Criminal (his
capitalization), the book galloped up the best-seller lists when Oprah
Winfrey abandoned her usual preference for fiction and chose this
non-fiction work for her book club.

It's a harrowing story. Part of its grip, Winfrey said, is that you
keep flipping to the back reminding yourself that Frey made it out
alive.

Of course, Frey's own life wasn't nearly as harrowing as A Million
Little Pieces and its follow-up, My Friend Leonard, claimed. Court
TV's The Smoking Gun website revealed last week that Frey didn't spend
three months in jail reading War and Peace to a fellow convict. He
didn't strike a patrolman with his car outside a bar in Ohio. He
wasn't covering for a girl in St. Joseph, Mich., the night she died in
a train wreck, so he probably didn't take any punches for it because
no one wanted to blame the girl's alleged football hero date.

The expose was damning. But what surprised me most, as a non-fiction
writer, was other people's lack of surprise -- and subsequent defenses
of the book's usefulness for convincing addicts to "hold on" for recovery.

Frey's memoir isn't the first bit of fiction passed off as truth.
Unfortunately, though, with all the corruption that non-fiction has
sustained of late, the genre is in danger in terms of public
credibility. If the Frey case tips a majority of readers to cynicism,
he'll have destroyed a form of writing that's far more useful for
achieving good than one quasi-memoir is. That hurts all of us who
write and read.

Despite scandals over the past few years from the likes of Jack Kelley
at USA TODAY and Jayson Blair at The New York Times, most non-fiction
writers do believe that anything purporting to be non-fiction should
be true. When they must change small details -- such as names -- they
let readers know. They spend hours interviewing people on both sides
of stories. They double-check statistics. They cringe every time their
work needs a correction. Writers want to be right because they know
that trust is what carries readers along for the ride.

When people read non-fiction, they expect to learn about this world,
not some other one where the stakes can be changed. Great works of
non-fiction such as John McPhee's Travels in Georgia lose their power
if you assume he didn't really shoot baskets with Jimmy Carter or eat
weasel, as he says.

Yet publisher Random House dismissed complaints of Frey's fibs by
saying he had "touched the lives of millions of readers." Winfrey said
the controversy was much ado about nothing because there were
"hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been changed by this
book." She added that Frey "stepped out of that history" as an addict
"to be the man that he is today, and to take that message to save
other people and allow them to save themselves."

Even Marianne Sanders, mother of the girl killed in the train accident
Frey described, told The Smoking Gun, "When I read that I figured he
was taking license ... he's a writer, you know; they don't tell
everything that's factual and true."

That's certainly disheartening for those of us who try to tell the
truth. But so what? The defense of Frey's work is that his fiction is
useful.

Masquerading as non-fiction, A Million Little Pieces convinces addicts
that they can reclaim their lives.

After all, Frey did, and look how bad he was. When Frey appeared on
Winfrey's show, the cameras followed at least one woman who chose to
get help as a result of his book. I don't want to minimize that
result. Philosophers through the ages have toyed with when it's OK to
lie for certain good ends. Usually, people who disagree with this
argument do so because they have a religious affection for the truth.
The Bible says not to bear false witness.

But I don't think truth can be defended only from a religious
perspective. It's as useful in its own right as Frey's fiction is for
addicts.

A newspaper story of a kid with a learning disability who overcomes
rough odds to go to college inspires us to try harder in our lives in
a way that fiction -- where we can manipulate the outcomes to make
success certain -- can't. The outcome is never certain in non-fiction.
Stories in this genre show we can be the architects of our existence.

The good Frey might do for addicts with his books is outweighed by the
damage he has done to future authors' abilities to convince readers of
stories that will change their lives.

That's not much ado about nothing. It's shattering the compact between
writers and readers into a million little pieces.