Media-crity

Millions of fans feel conned, gypped, and betrayed by James Frey and A Million Little Pieces and I’m going to tell you why I don’t.

I read MLP in the spring of 2004 after it was recommended to me by an internship supervisor-turned-friend when I shared with her a story I wrote about a man addicted to cocaine, inspired by true life events. Her life had also been touched by addiction and when she learned that mine was, she lent me the book. I was pulled in by it, chewed up, and spit out with everything put back together differently. Together, we dissected it at length, comparing battle scars reopened by Frey’s raw-edged prose. We were the only ones we knew who had read it, and we didn’t dare recommend it to just anyone. It was too weighty, the subject material cut too deep. No, MLP was like a secret club, something to be shared prefaced with a disclaimer of “It’s really intense, and kind of gory at parts, impossible to read at others, but you might like it …”

Then, Oprah happened. Dear, sweet, well-meaning Oprah departed from her usual selections and took her book club down a more gnarled, jagged path. Before long, suburban housewives were gasping when Frey vomited for the twelfth time, themselves gagging on lunch when he got his root canal with only tennis balls to squeeze to control the pain until his nails shattered, discussing his every relapse over coffee, weeping when he found the redemption he had fought so hard against. Suburban housewives who probably also secretly collected their childrens urine for home drug testing.

Everyone at Harpo read it, too. There were daily watercooler discussions. Sleep-deprived employees, hell, even Oprah herself, crying openly in the halls.

Then, The Smoking Gun happened. They broke open his story, exposing alleged embellishments and outright fabrications. They vilified him, putting him down in a fiery pit with the likes of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair. The millions of sheep Oprah shepherded Frey’s way responded in kind, guided by a new messiah with a new message: Frey was a dirty, rotten man who should be spit upon if you run into him on the street. And certainly don’t waste your tears and pity on such a despicable individual.

Wait, wasn’t that his point in the first place? But I digress. They feel betrayed. They welcomed this man into their hearts, they prayed for him, and parts of him never existed. That’s all this book is to them– the tragic story of a reluctant an unlikely hero. A bit less palatable than, say, Macbeth, but the archetype is still the same.

The Smoking Gun does have some hard evidence, I’m not going to lie. I don’t know Frey personally, I don’t know anything about him beyond what he has written. However, it doesn’t diminish how I feel about the book. There are those of us, like my friend and I, with whom the book resonated due to an association with addiction, can appreciate it for what it is, however true or fabricated it may be. The fact of the matter remains, the writing is solid and the story is compelling. Frey is no Janet Cooke and MLP is no Jimmy’s World.

Even Oprah can see that. Frey appeared on Larry King Live last week and Oprah called in near the end of the show. In that call, she dismissed the controversy as “much ado about nothing,” and encouraged readers who had been inspired by Frey’s long crawl back from hell to “keep holding on.”

“What is relevant is that he was a drug addict … and stepped out of that history to be the man he is today and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves,” she said.

This explosion is a perfect illustration of why, despite my great respect for Oprah and all that she does, I just can’t get on board with the Oprah’s Book Club concept. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that adults are picking up books and reading, but it makes me so sad that adults need Oprah to tell them what to read. Part of the joy of reading is wandering through bookstores and libraries, picking up books, and reading the back cover or inner flaps. There’s an afternoon of entertainment just browsing amazon.com. There’s a bond to be shared when books are recommended between friends, not a pretty lady who talks to you from the TV.

The book club is a symptom of a larger disease: the watering down of culture. Rather than decide for themselves that a book or a CD or a movie is worthy of high praise and half a million loyal followers a day, the teeming masses let Oprah and Starbucks decide for them. Art becomes a packaged commodity without much thought to consumers as individuals. It’s boxed up in unmarked brown cartons and distributed unilaterally. In the case of MLP, the masses accepted their required reading material. Then, as a collective mind, when they realized that maybe the literary meal they were spoon-fed perhaps wasn’t what they had expected of it, they turned on a man who wrote a story. A good story by a talented writer whose spare prose cuts right into the cranial cavities of those readers whose minds are open to what he has to say, for better or for worse. Readers like me. Like my friend.

Like Oprah.