If there's one name everyone in the publishing industry seems weary of hearing, it's James Frey's. Despite an internal note of exhaustion about all things related to A Million Little Pieces, the public and the media are still as interested as ever in the literary scandal. Three weeks after the Smoking Gun story on Frey ran, a Google News search for the author's last name turned up a whopping 5,000 hits. Now, as stories and questions about other memoirs surface, the headlines point to one thing: the public and the media aren't ready to close the book on this topic.
William Bastone, editor of TheSmokingGun.com, said he has been deluged with requests for Frey-like investigations into other memoirs. "I have no idea whether these are legitimate inquiries," he said, pointing out that titles by authors Augusten Burroughs, Dave Pelzer and Anthony Swofford are, for reasons unknown to him, consistently cropping up in the e-mails.
While Bastone said his site, which has a reporting staff of three, won't be making literary muckraking a staple of its reportage, there is a chance he and his colleagues will look into Frey's second memoir, My Friend Leonard. "[Since our story ran] a lot of people have come out of the woodwork who've had contact or business arrangements with Mr. Frey," he said. "And there are a lot of open areas of inquiry with regard to the second book; everyone's been focusing on book one."
Some readers have even suggested the site start its own fact-checking division. Bastone said he's received a few e-mails from authors "asking if we'd be willing to vet their books/memoirs so that they could later claim to have been given a clean bill of health." Bastone added, "A few kooky people have even suggested that we start placing our own Oprah-esque stickers on titles we've approved."
In the post-Frey landscape, the most significant story of literary deception has come from the L.A. Weekly. In a lengthy January 25 piece entitled "Navahoax," author Matt Fleischer exposed a white midlist author of gay porn as the creator of a scribe known as Nasdijj, a supposed Navajo memoirist who's won significant literary acclaim (not to mention a National Magazine Award). The story (which has been picked up by the AP, Time and the Washington Post, among others) was in the works for eight months and, according to L.A. Weekly senior features editor Tom Christie (who edited the piece), "probably got more hits than anything we've ever run." Adding that he thinks the topic of falsified memoirs and lying authors will remain a hot one, Christie says the public has a right to know what they're reading: "It is literary fraud."
As is to be expected, the blogosphere has followed the media's lead. At a blog called Truth to Power, a contest is running (the prize is lunch at Michael's with "a real book agent") for submissions containing "the best lies" in a list of memoirs ranging from Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star (http://theinvestigators.blogspot.com/2006/01/memoir-or-make-believe.html).
While publishers and those within the industry are still puzzled about what to do in response to the Frey scandal, the fascination with authors who've found success through lying is clearly part of a much bigger story. As Little, Brown editor-in-chief Geoff Shandler put it, the reaction to James Frey, at a certain point, becomes less about book publishing and more about "the public's obsession with celebrity, scandal and fame."
