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Carl Hiaasen
I’m not making this up … well, maybe I am
By CARL HIAASEN, columnist for the Miami Herald
Article published on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2006 |
I’m writing a memoir called “A Million Little Royalty Checks.”
It opens with a graphic, bowel-wrenching account of the time I had a double-kidney transplant without anesthesia.
The truth (which I won’t tell my readers) is that I’ve never had major surgery – although once I had a mole sliced off my shoulder by a skin doctor. He froze it first, which I suppose counts as an anesthetic.
That’s the truth and admittedly it’s mundane, but here’s the good part: Truth doesn’t seem to matter these days when you’re penning a memoir.
Look at James Frey, author of the phenomenal bestseller called “A Million Little Pieces.” It purportedly is a factual recounting of his time as a felonious drug addict and alcoholic, and of his subsequent recovery.
Early on, Frey gruesomely describes suffering through back-to-back root canal procedures without painkillers, because the staff at the rehab clinic wouldn’t let him have any.
That passage seemed mighty peculiar to me, since the most commonly used anesthetic for tooth surgery – Lidocaine – isn’t a narcotic and isn’t addictive. A dentist friend later assured me that the scene in the book was “total b.s.”
Still, Frey’s writing was compelling, so I kept reading. I was 113 pages along when, last week, an investigative Web site called The Smoking Gun revealed that Frey had wildly juiced up his life story.
The site published interviews, police reports and other documents that demolished the author’s version of at least two pivotal events in the book.
One was his description of a drunken confrontation with Ohio police in which Frey claimed to have struck a cop with a car and then tangled violently with officers. He claimed the incident landed him in jail for three months.
Not true. According to the police report, he was stopped on an open-container violation and charged with DUI. There’s no mention of him running down an officer or misbehaving in any way.
Nor did he endure three harrowing months behind bars with bad-a__ thugs, as asserted in the book. He spent exactly one night in the tank, and bonded out the next morning.
Another bogus yarn involved the tragic death of a high-school classmate in a 1986 car-train collision. Frey claimed the victim was a dear friend with whom he’d been with earlier on the night she died. He said he was wrongly held to blame by her family, and interrogated at length by police.
Not true, according to the victim’s parents, who couldn’t recall their daughter ever mentioning Frey as a friend. Likewise, police said they’d never heard he was with her that night, nor had they ever interviewed him about the accident.
You’d think that both author and publisher would be embarrassed by this stuff, but they don’t act that way.
While Frey now admits making up some details in the book, he says it’s insignificant. He stands by his account of addiction and rehab, although he won’t specify which anecdotes are true and which aren’t.
Meanwhile his hardcover publisher, Doubleday, has stated: “Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence ... (Frey) represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections.”
In other words, nobody checked out his story before printing it, but that’s no big deal.
This is happy news for me. Doubleday is a division of Random House, the company that publishes my books, which for years I have been naively labeling as “novels.”
Evidently the fussy distinction between fiction and nonfiction is evaporating. Once upon a time, memoirs were based on actual events as remembered by the author, not on imaginary events invented by the author.
Frey wasn’t hazy about how much time he’d spent in jail. He flat-out lied; a cynical deception now defended as creative license by his many ardent supporters.
Even Oprah Winfrey, who chose “A Million Little Pieces” for her book club and transformed Frey into a celebrity, phoned the Larry King show to dismiss the revelations of fakery as “much ado about nothing.”
Go, Oprah! Maybe she’ll invite me on the program when my lurid memoir is published. I look forward to jumping up and down on her couch. Meantime, I won’t be able to finish reading Frey’s life story, because I’m too busy making up my own.
Right now I’m writing the part where Julia Roberts and I get trashed on cheap tequila, steal a shrimp boat and wind up in a beachside cabana on St. Barts.
I haven’t quite figured out how the chapter will end, since my wife is rather firmly requesting to proofread it.
Carl Hiaasen can be contacted by e-mail at HeraldEd@aol.com.
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Article published on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2006
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