The world of English Literature is filled with endless adventures and mysteries of all sorts, but it also has its fair share of memoirs and autobiographies. A Million Little Pieces, a memoir that was a huge hit when it was first released, eventually became popular but due to all the wrong reasons.
James Frey, the Cleveland-born writer, has authored several books, including various memoirs, adventure books, and the Lorien Legacy series. Frey has also written the scripts for several films, TV dramas, and other television programs. His 2008 novel, Bright Shiny Morning, managed to attract many readers with its intriguing plot.
Despite Frey’s legacy as a great writer, he turned the whole literature and entertainment world against him when he became involved in a controversy. From Oprah Winfrey to Kassie Evashevski, many lost their trust in Frey after he was caught lying in a best-selling memoir.
James Frey: The Million Little Pieces Author
Memoirs are almost always dear to the author’s heart since they’re summing up all of their life’s memories in a book. James came out with A Million Little Pieces in the early 2000s, a time when memoirs were not as popular as they were in the ’90s.
Regardless of the trends, Frey’s memoir turned the tide around, and soon enough, the Million Little Pieces book started attracting a lot of attention.
Anyone and Anything that happened to reach popularity had to be on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah also had a book club, giving James Frey all the more reason to be on the show and talk about his moving and grim memoir.
A Million Little Pieces was a tale of drug dependency, alcohol, crime, and eventual rehabilitation. Despite its rough and “brutally honest” words, Frey’s memoir was gaining positive reviews, and it wasn’t long before Amazon made it their favorite book of the year.
Oprah read the book and liked it so much that she made Frey’s memoir a part of her book club, giving it more exposure and readers in the following months. Frey enjoyed the fame, but it wasn’t long before the Lorien Legacies writer had no choice but to come clean.
James Frey Controversy: The Author Reveals Memoir Is Fake
Seeing A Million Little Pieces’ popularity, many started to doubt if the events within it were even true. The book talked about Frey having a girlfriend who ended her life and various other details that seemed too unrealistic for a memoir.
Eventually, people started to search if the events that happened in Frey’s book were real. No one could find a woman named Lilly who ended her life, even having gone as far as searching the CDC Database. The Smoking Gun looked into Frey’s criminal history and found that it was much cleaner than Frey claimed it was in his books.
This led to a series of discoveries which led James Frey to admit publicly that most parts of his memoir are fictional and added to make the memoir more interesting. Soon enough, Frey was back on Oprah Winfrey’s show where she blamed him for lying to his readers and claiming all of it was real.
By 2006, Winfrey interviewed James once again, but this time to let him talk about the reason behind the fabrication of his popular memoir.
James revealed that it was the same demons that made him do drugs and alcohol that led him to lie in his memoir. Winfrey played a huge role in bringing Frey’s life into the public, for which she was called a Mensh by Richard Cohen.
The aftermath of this James Frey controversy wasn’t great, as James’ manager, Kassie Evashevski, dropped him, and many companies like Penguin took away the deals that they had with Frey. A new settlement came into the picture, where any reader who felt wronged by James Frey could get a refund.
Despite its rather fictional nature, not many readers wanted to get a refund because the Million Little Pieces was interesting, even though it was fake. Now almost 18 years since Frey was a part of the controversy, the author has continued to release new books and other projects.
James Frey did get a heated public reaction recently after it was revealed that he was using MFA students to do his work and paying them low salaries. James Frey continues to come out with exciting works regardless of his past.
