Oprah strikes a blow for truthiness

Frey made the expected apologies Thursday, even admitting he had lied — and, because everything is about him, saying he hoped the whole travesty helped him in “being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure I don’t repeat them.”

But given Frey's perch atop the bestseller lists (including, in a sad moment for book classification, the New York Times' nonfiction list) it's hard to believe he's feeling too sorry — and more likely that he's sticking by his earlier defense on his (now nonfunctioning) Web site, Bigjimindustries.com, the one in which he stood by his book, told us haters we could hate and said he wouldn't “dignify this bulls--- with any sort of further response.”

Except perhaps the one he offered when Oprah dragged him onto her airtime to give him a well-deserved smackdown.

Now for the full disclaimer: I haven't read more than a few excerpts of Frey's book. If I want to indulge myself with embellished tales of privileged white boys screwing up their lives with drugs, I can go to my next college reunion, or find a copy of Jay McInerney's old novels in the remainders pile. (Guess who's a huge McInerney fan, by the way?) 

The amateurish, punctuation-deprived tidbits I did muddle through left me cold, though perhaps I didn't endure enough of Frey's rambling to appreciate his emotional truth. Plus, I have a strange ailment which forces me to like my fiction more or less fictional, and my nonfiction more or less true.

That's a minority view these days, since political discourse has long since moved past defining what “is” is, beyond what “unknown unknowns” might be or whether it was possible to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, into the realm of mediocre fiction. And the default response to any memoir is now to assume it comes with a dose of truth-fudging. After MSNBC's gossip columnist Jeannette Walls published her memoir “The Glass Castle” last year, she found herself “perplexed, infuriated and even a bit amused” at how many readers questioned her own true story about a tough childhood.

‘Deeply inspiring and redemptive’
This laissez-faire attitude toward the truth shows itself nowhere more boldly than in the statement Frey's publishers, Doubleday and Anchor Books, released in response to the charge that their big meal ticket was a fraud.

“We decided 'A Million Little Pieces' was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections,” they said, going on to argue that “the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.”

So basically, truthiness reigns.

The enduring irony of the whole Frey mess is this: He himself admitted that “Pieces” was shopped around both as a novel and as nonfiction. Apparently either would have suited him just fine, so long as his name showed up on a book jacket.

In 1990, former undercover cop Kim Wozencraft published her first novel, “Rush.”  Not unlike Frey's book, it details a middle-class descent into addiction — though unlike Frey, Wozencraft's drug troubles began when her narcotics gig prompted her to start shooting up. Also unlike Frey, no one ever questioned Wozencraft's prison stint (rather longer than Frey's two-hour stay in holding) or other details of her harrowing experience.

Wozencraft saw fiction as a safe way to document her real life. Frey? The line between the two was functionally irrelevant.

The bestselling “Rush” was later adapted into a 1991 movie starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. It has not, however, been an Oprah Book Club pick, the new holy grail of publishing. 

So maybe a good dose of truthiness makes all the difference.

MSNBC.com lifestyle editor Jon Bonné is really glad he opted against that “FTBSITTTD” tattoo.

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