He still doesn't get it. Do they?

The killer quote from James Frey's note about "A Million Little Pieces" to his readers:

"This memoir is a combination of facts about my life and certain embellishments. It is a subjective truth, altered by the mind of a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Ultimately, it’s a story, and one that I could not have written without having lived the life I’ve lived."

He still doesn't get the difference between memoir/autobiography/creative nonfiction and fiction.

Not so for Doubleday and Anchor Books, Frey’s publishers, which declares in its note to readers, "It is not the policy or stance ofthis company that it doesn't matter whether a book sold as nonfiction is true. A nonfiction book should adhere to the facts as the author knows them."

Actually, doesn't that last line leave them some wiggle room? What does "the facts as the author knows them" mean?

The publisher is foregoing revenue -- no small sacrifice given Frey's #6 standing on Amazon.com -- by "not currently reprinting or fulfilling orders" until the jacket carries the line "With new notes from the publisher and from the author."

But then Frey could have suffered the fate of novelist and short story writer David Leavitt, who published ''While England Sleeps," a 1993 novel about a young, gay British writer and the Spanish Civil War. The poet Stephen Spender accused Leavitt of plagiarizing Spender's memoir ''World Within World''; Leavitt countered that you can't plagiarize the events of a person's life, although he didn't deny that he used Spender's life in print "as a springboard."

The London Telegraph picks up the story from there. "Spender sued. Penguin settled out of court. An entire print run was pulped." A new, revised edition replaced the first, tainted one.

The ironic part of what became "a legal cause celebre" is that from the start, Leavitt said he wanted to include an author's note, paying tribute to his book's debt to Spender, but a lawyer for Penguin, his publisher, nixed the idea.

(Turning lemon into lemonades, Leavitt later wrote ''The Term Paper Artist,'' "a novella featuring a writer named David Leavitt who has been accused of plagiarism by a famous British poet.")

An author's note might not have saved Leavitt from the ire of Spender who was outraged by the book's homosexual love scenes.

But I'd count it as one more buttress for the value of coming clean about the provenance of books. As someone who sometimes writes in a genre that could be labelled "memoir" and works hard to document what I write, attribute its source, and signal the reader when I'm moving from memory to imagination, I find the entire Frey affair dispiriting and expect it to remain so for a long while.

I won't be surprised if Frey uses the material of his recent days, although I can't imagine that mere words could oustrip the sight of Oprah's cold fury.

Read the full note, all 912 words, and see what you think. I know there are still people who know what he did, and don't care. As for me, I'm left cold, not by the litany of his lies, oh, sorry, I mean embellishments, but by his justification for them.

"I believe, and I understand others strongly disagree, that memoir allows the writer to work from memory instead of from strict journalistic or historical standard. It is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection... It is a subjective truth."

In a sense, he's right, since subjective truths "exist only within the experiencer's mind."

There's no denying that writing must make a journey from the writer's mind to the page or screen. Unfortunately, James Frey, his editor, agent and publisher apparently lost sight of the difference between fact and fiction along the way. I think they ended up betraying all of us who care about the difference.

But I guess that's just a subjective truth.

Comments

[Vicki Rock]

I had an e-mail debate with a librarian this morning who insists it doesn't matter if Frey told the truth or not because his story was so powerful. I replied it was fiction and should have been marketed as such. He lied.