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As for Frey, he isn't giving an inch--or he gives an inch, but that's all. He wrote on his own website www.bigjimindustries.com) "Let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won't dignify this bulls___ with any sort of further response." On Wednesday (having apparently reconsidered that last part), he turned up on Larry King Live with a somewhat more nuanced position. "A memoir is a subjective retelling of events," he said. "It's an individual's perception of what happened in their own life. This is my recollection of my life." (He compared his book to Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird--a misstep, since Kosinski's book was published as a novel.) Oprah called in to the show to lend Frey her carefully phrased support. "The underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me," she said. "And I know it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book."
But even though she was covering Frey's back, Winfrey didn't miss the opportunity to protect her own rear, making it clear that she considered publishers, and not herself, responsible for any blowback. "I am disappointed by this controversy," she said, "because I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work."
That's not actually how it works. Publishers pass the buck to authors. Amazingly, it's rare for a publisher to fact-check the books it sells. Publishers usually just require writers to swear up and down that their books are true and authentic, and leave it at that. "It's pretty much standard practice, outside of potentially libelous statements, that the author is essentially responsible," says Larry Kirshbaum, a literary agent and former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group. "To my knowledge there is very rarely any fact-checking. I think it would be almost impossible to fact-check all the titles that are published by a single publisher. It would be onerous."
As the industry explanation, onerous is not entirely satisfying to readers who believe they are getting a true story. Memoirs have become increasingly lurid in recent years, oozing with child abuse, poverty, drugs, alcohol, violence and insanity, and sex in any number of unsavory flavors; the bar was permanently raised (or lowered) in 1997, when Kathryn Harrison published The Kiss, an account of her four-year affair with her father. Not coincidentally, memoirs have also become one of the best-selling categories in publishing. It's not hard to imagine the combination of high stakes and a reigning spirit of hotly contested one-downsmanship leading writers to exaggerate.
But leaving aside the basic weirdness of a man's reputation being damaged by the fact that he didn't do jail time, there's also a larger cultural collision in progress here. Right now, according to Nielsen BookScan, nonfiction outsells fiction by about 100 million books a year. "Fiction seems to have lost a lot of authority in the culture," says Michael Coffey, executive managing editor at Publishers Weekly. "People now look more toward true stories as something that justifies the expense of their time."