I’m in conflict with what writing is, in conflict with what literature is, in conflict with what people’s acceptable standards are. In conflict with the idea of what fiction and non-fiction is, or are. There are things that will play themselves out. I’m not done with twisting the lines of fact or fiction. I’m not finished with that issue by any stretch of the imagination. There isn’t a great deal of difference between fact and fiction, it’s just how you choose to tell a story...

The only standards imposed on the creation of [my] books are the ones I want there to be. What means something is if my book is read in 50 years. That’s the only goal. If I have to take some big shots in the process of trying to make that happen, then I’m prepared to take those big shots...

He says, with undisguised relish, that his next book will be called The Final Testament of the Bible. As he describes it, you couldn’t fault the honesty of the title’s intentions. It will concern his ideas of who and what the Messiah is – he doesn’t claim he’s it – as if Christ were walking the streets of New York.

Frey can swagger like this because he knows he's not going to earn his bank on nonfiction ever again. And a novelist can trash the concept of absolute, objective truth as much as he wants without taking a hit on book sales. Heck, he might even get some free publicity out of it!

[Times of London via Observer]

1. The paparazzi. It's time to establish some rules that when broken have some punitive consequences.

2. The Stars... Brad and Angelina could have taken a lesson from Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick¹s playbook. When their son, James, was born, they called every photo agency in New York and organized a photo shoot at the door of hospital as they were leaving. In one five-minute frenzy of flashes, everyone had the photo..

3. The magazines and the media... Movies advertise "No animals were harmed in the making of this film." How many celebrity weeklies and tv shows can say the same about the stars they feature? Let's invite heads of photo agencies, the stars' PR agents or the stars themselves, top magazine editors, TV execs and web producers to sit and talk (no paps outside, ok?). My agenda, if I were leading such a summit, would include...

Keep leveraging those awesome communication skills Joe!

[Huffington Post]

The review is illustrated with a clay bust of Frey, wearing a striped t-shirt of the variety that three-year-olds wear. So that's embarrassing. But that's only the beginning! Writes frequent Book Review contributor Walter Kirn:

"When Frey presents Parker's agent as "incredibly smart, incredibly savvy, incredibly smooth, incredibly successful and incredibly rich," it's possible — if one is used to being demeaned and has grown practiced in denial — to think that Frey is being bad on purpose; that he's reproducing others' mental impoverishment rather than exhibiting his own. It's hard to sustain such a charitable view, though, after seeing a character depicted as "an extremely attractive woman in her early 30s," a pair of chaise longues as "stylish, yet comfortable" and Beverly Hills's Rodeo Drive as "lined with the most expensive and most exclusive boutiques in the world." These aren't images, they're ratings. This isn't fiction, it's catalog copy. And "stylish, yet comfortable" isn't a description, it's a Zagat's review — but based on what? Who knows? The primary data about things and people that would allow us to apprehend Frey's world is sorely lacking in the book."

"Here is some of Frey's prose, ladled up from the huge pitcher in which he has blended events, ideas, dialogue and dozens of pages of Wikipedian trivia relating to everything from Los Angeles's freeways to its neighborhoods and street gangs into a sort of verbal fruit smoothie every sip of which has the same consistency."

[Illustration: Karen Caldicott]

Dolce is connected to Frey not only through friendship, but also via the business dealings of his boyfriend and reported husband, John Burnham. As we mentioned in February, Burnham is the HarperCollins editor who "stunned" colleagues by inking the Bright Shiny Morning deal with Frey, thus delivering him a big payday.

How interesting that his life partner Dolce has now been brought onto the startup of someone recently paid by Frey.

This begs several questions the Post apparently did not ask, but should have: How much did Frey pay Goldin? How much money, if any, is Dolce investing in his "partnership" with Goldin? And how much money will Dolce be taking out?

The Post described Frey's involvement in the Dolce-Goldin partnership as merely an email introduction and suggestion to do business. But it's hard to look at all the money changing hands and backscratching going on here and not imagine that a kind of laundering is taking place, of Frey's reputation and social stature, certainly, but of the author's advance, as well. Frey's Bright Shiny Morning payday came under heavy, if expected, criticism, and Frey is carefully steering some of the money to at least one friend, Goldin, who in turn is helping other Frey friends.

This is an adroit move on the part of the disgraced writer, and is a big part of why Frey's life more and more has come to resemble the narrative arc in A Million Little Pieces, his faked autobiography: A public and almost pornographically brutal descent followed by rehabilitation and unlikely redemption.

Twelve-step meeting advice aside, sometimes that redemption can't be left entirely to a higher power. It has to be engineered, one relationship at a time.

[Post]

And no one seems to care about Frey's disclaimer that "nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable," either. When a real city is named, along with real people and events within that city, it seems some readers expect accuracy. A list of the errors found by one blogger:

• "In 1873, the city's first newspaper, the Los Angeles Daily Herald, opens." — Can't be true because there were two other newspapers publishing in the 1850s.
• In 1895 all of the incorporated banks in LA County are robbed at least once - The author of a book about one LA bank, plus a search of the LA Times Historical Newspaper Index, indicate this is false.
• The city instituted water metering in 1895 - The city did not own its own water supply at the time, and a private water company did not start metering until 1904.
• Frey said LA had 14,000 people in 1865. In fact, it was about one-third that.

See? Unlike any other novelists, James Frey got historical minutiae wrong! Probably on purpose, just so he could sensationally claim that the LA didn't have a newspaper until 1873 and move the date of water metering forward nine years. He has not changed one bit. Scandal!

(Related: The LA Times hated on Bright Shiny Morning for a far better reason — it's a boring, poorly written and shallow (not just inaccurate) caricature of Los Angeles.)

[Observer, Ghost World]

Her: What do you write?

Frey: I used to write screenplays now I write books.

Her: Oh, what kind of books, fiction or non-fiction?

Frey: (chuckles) Well, that's been up for debate recently.

Her: (absolutely no irony whatsoever) Well, don't you think you should choose?

Frey: (an arrogant laugh) To be honest with you, I don't really give a shit.

(Scene)

In related news, violence was reported at his book release party.

"Bright Shiny Morning" is an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining.

Written as an Altman-esque collage, it follows several parallel story lines that never coalesce. The idea is to trace a collective vision of the city, high and low, from Hollywood to the Valley to East L.A. — an attempt to get at the fluidity of Los Angeles.

There's Old Man Joe, a drunk who inhabits a bathroom on the Venice boardwalk and seeks mystical affirmation in a daily ritual. Or Amberton Parker, a St. Paul's and Harvard-educated Oscar-winning actor, who lives a perfect life with his wife and children and has a secret. (Bet you can't guess what it is.)

As a connective device, Frey interweaves a series of short passages outlining the history of L.A., beginning with the founding of the Pueblo and extending to the present day. Yet this strategy ends up as a metaphor for all that's wrong with the book. These bits read like encyclopedia entries, devoid of soul or personality, so generic as to be inconsequential, as if Frey has no interest or engagement in what he has chosen to write about.

That's the issue with "Bright Shiny Morning" — or one of them, anyway. Frey seems to know little about Los Angeles and to have no interest in it as a real place where people wrestle with actual life. There are obligatory riffs on freeways and natural disasters and a chapter on visual artists that lists "the highest price ever paid for a piece of their work in a public auction." There are also occasional installments of "Fun Facts" about the city, as if to give the illusion of a certain depth. Did you know that it is "illegal to lick a toad within the city limits of Los Angeles"? Neither did I. But I also don't know what this has to do with the larger story of the novel, except as another example of L.A. as odd and quirky, a territory in which we all "live with Angels and chase their dreams."

Frey, of course, intends this to be amusing, lighthearted and witty in tone. ("Learning fun facts is really an enjoyable, and sometimes enlightening process," he writes. "And, of course, it's fun too!!!") It comes off as two-dimensional, however, not to mention poorly written and conceived — much like the book's narrative elements.

More heart-warming examples of garbage being called garbage here.

In the fourth grade, at a public school in Queens, Kopelson's teacher went on strike. He turned in to her replacement as his own report a verbatim transcription of a 20-page encyclopedia entry on explorer Hernando Cortez. He got an "A." "'Nice work!' Mr X commented. But, of course, unless the man was being ironic, he probably hadn’t read it – lazy bastard."

Kopelson also criticizes the instructor he submitted plagiarized work to at Yale. She taught a "contemptible" music class. So instead of doing his own work, Kopelson submitted a paper his brother had written for a graduate school seminar. It was 50 pages long and included citations of work in French, German and Italian. Kopelson was only 18, hardly able to write such a thing. Still, he got an "A."

Kopelson used the same paper from his brother as a writing sample for the GRE graduate school test. He got into the English doctorate programs at Columbia and Brown.

At Brown, Kopelson has a "very old, very flatulent" professor who didn't seem to have revised his lectures in decades. Again, he found this instructor and his class "contemptible." So Kopelson submitted as his own essay an article called The Beast in the Closet. He got an "A."

Later, he sent this article to the woman who wrote it as a sample of his own writing. Somehow, he wasn't caught.

Now, giving lectures in Iowa to students he also has contempt for — they tend to be poor students, since the English department is one of the few without a minimum GPA requirement — Kopelson plagiarizes other authors for his in-class lectures.

Also, if I'm reading his essay correctly, it sounds like Kopelson is also implying that he plagiarized David Sedaris for Kopelson's book about the humor writer.

But, hey, at least we know the odds are pretty good the professor wrote his own confessional. Plagiarism isn't quite so hot yet that anyone else would claim to have done this much fibbing. But once Kopelson gets a big book deal out of his admission (like the Lonely Planet guy!), that's sure to change.

[London Review Of Books]

(Photo via University of Iowa)

Crisis, violence, redemption, whatever: that's what he knew about. That's what he wrote about. That's what he passed off as nonfiction. That's why he sounded as if he'd seen too many lousy movies.
So the Bright Shiny Morning guy did it differently. He let the little vignette play out against a big, gaudy, dangerous Southern California backdrop, full of drug-dealing gang-bangers, full of schemers, phonies, rich with a history of robber barons, all of it listed here, all of it stacking the deck against any generosity of spirit. The son steals the maid's virtue? Been there, read that. They plot against the old lady? Been there too. This novelist wanted something else for Esperanza: he wanted to honor her, fall in love with her, do it with startling sincerity. He wanted to save her.

And it worked.

That's how James Frey saved himself.

...

...
[Bright Shiny Morning on Amazon]

"He said this again?" she said, her voice rising in indignation. "I can’t believe he said that! You’d better check that because it’s simply not true."

When will Nan Talese, and the rest of the publishing industry, find a damn writer they can trust? If not James Frey, then who??

[Observer]

Unnoticed under the din of all the turbo-charged, unflinching, badass excitement was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in which the reporter, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, raised questions about the plausibility of the book. She asked Talese about possible factual discrepancies, and why there wasn't an author's note if, as Frey had told reporters, names and identifying characteristics had been changed. Talese said, "It's a total slipup that we didn't have a disclaimer page. I'm embarrassed."

"There's nothing to do there. You can go out to the yard and walk around or shoot hoops or lift weights. I didn't really want to do anything, so I spent most of my time reading books." He added that his reading list inside the slammer included Don Quixote, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov.

James Frey's Morning After [Vanity Fair]

To promote the book, Mr. Frey will eschew typical bookstore readings for events at rock venues. He will appear at the Blender Theater in New York, Whisky A Go Go in L.A., and Slim's in San Francisco. At each venue, he will have music and a light show, with images from "Wives, Wheels, Weapons" projected on a screen while he reads. At the San Francisco and L.A. readings, local heavy metal bands will perform.

Members of the Hell's Angels will handle security at the events, in what Mr. McWhinnie described as an allusion to the infamous 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway, in which fighting between members of the crowd and the Angels led to one fan's being stabbed to death. Presumably Mr. Frey will not attempt to carry the historical echo that far, but who knows? Perhaps he can stage an altercation and use it as grist for his next book.

[NY Sun]

Inside the book, in small type, they placed a small, incomplete disclaimer that contradicted the labeling on the dust jacket. Free Press and William Morrow are shamelessly stripping the label "non-fiction" of all meaning, at least when they're the ones affixing it. That sort of institutionalized lying is far more pernicious than the freelance deception Frey and Seltzer engaged in.

The Boston Globe dug deep into Mezrich's book, about blackjack-playing MIT students, on Sunday.

Mezrich openly admitted that five of the six main characters from House are not real at all but amalgams of two decades worth of blackjack teams. And who knows whether to trust him even on that, given that he appears to have outright invented other book elements.

The one character in Mezrich's book who is not a composite, the team leader, is portrayed teaching at MIT, which he never did.

The blackjack players in Bringing Down The House smuggle large amounts of cash through airport security using "fake umbrellas and laptop computers, plaster casts and hollow crutches" and eventually by strapping it to their bodies, according to the Globe. But the blackjack team leader said he has never even heard of those techniques, much less used them.

A blue-eyed security guy following the blackjack team supposedly beats one player up in a casino bathroom, but none of the MIT blackjack players contacted by the Globe remembered such a thing happening, or such a security guy.

The best part of the Globe story is easily the weasely quotes from the author and his editors. Here's Mezrich:

"I took literary license to make it readable... The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it's true."

That sounds familiar.

The editorial director of Bringing Down The House's publisher, Free Press, said fabrication was neccesary to protect some players' anonymity. "There was an obvious need for privacy of some of the people involved," he told the Globe.

The editorial director seemed caught off guard that his author had stretched the truth for narrative purposes — he said that sort of thing is not OK. But he must have known he was marketing as "real-life" biography a work of fabrications, since his company included the disclaimer above.

Mezrich's new publisher, William Morrow, is even more brazen. The company is marketing supposed nonfiction from Mezrich that includes, buried at the end of the author's note, a disclaimer "that warns readers about changed names, compressed time periods, and altered identities and backgrounds. Certain characters, it goes on, 'are not meant to portray particular people.'"

Mauro DiPreta, the book's editor at William Morrow, says the disclaimer was inserted simply "to let the reader know what to expect in the book." What Mezrich does, he argues, is clearly nonfiction. "Sometimes reality is messy," he says. "I think it can be fine to streamline a story for narrative purposes."

Not everyone is happy that the idea of true nonfiction is being destroyed before our very eyes. Narrative non-fiction pioneer Gay Talese and WW Norton editor Robert Weil are quoted rebuking the practice.

But everyone actually involved with producing and potentially profiting from Mezrich's projects seems quite comfortable labeling fiction as nonfiction. They get to potentially profit from deals for movies like 21, and all they have to do is define truth the way one of Mezrich's characters does at the end of the Globe story:

"It's 90 percent true if you count things that happened to anyone," he says. "It's only about half true if you define it as actual things happening to the actual people they happened to."

[Globe]

There is a disclaimer at the end of the This American Life broadcast, to the effect that the Moth is a place where "people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales." As I think should be obvious if you listen to it, my story definitely belongs to the "tall tale" category. I hope you enjoy it. But please do so with a rather large grain of salt.

Gladwell has been telling the story of getting "perverse and often baffling" into the Washington Post for years. And as he says at the end of the story, you can look it up: He really did get the phrase in the paper (we found it on Nexis!). The story is not a total fabrication. On some level, Gladwell wants it both ways: He wants to tell a funny story, which the perverse and often baffling story is, and wants to be a trustworthy journalist. Is that worth condemnation?

When I heard Gladwell at the Moth event and later on This American Life, I let myself forget that that Moth stories can be tall tales. I took everything Gladwell said without a grain of salt, because, to keep the food analogy going, it tasted better that way. Perhaps I overreacted when Gladwell referred to having a "Jayson Blair moment" so casually.

As the memoir craze shows, people like "true" stories. Before James Frey turned out to be a liar, the dental surgery scene in A Million Little Pieces was moving precisely because I thought that Frey had really had a root canal without Novocain. There's no reason that story should be less inspiring because it was embellished, but somehow it is. The same is true for Walden, the Henry David Thoreau memoir of his life in the woods. Whenever that book comes up, some wiseass always needs to mention that Thoreau's mom did his laundry while he was contemplating self-reliance. But should that make his work any less valuable?

Maybe it's unfair that knowing that Gladwell wasn't exactly betting his friend to get absurd phrases into the Washington Post makes his story less compelling, even while it makes it less offensive. But it's a perverse and often baffling part of human nature that we want stories, even unbelievable ones, to be true.

His website is entirely reblogged stories about hard-drinking writers and YouTube clips. I don't think there's any original content on it. The man is just incapable of love. He's not exactly an internet plagiarist — he credits the original authors — but I would think after the whole Oprah thing, he would want to avoid further looking like a fraud.

Even when he's being self-referential, he's stealing from other people: He posts a clip of a lesbian saying she hates of Jenny the L-Word so much, that she wants the character to have a James Frey experience on Oprah. And anyway, hating Jenny from the L-Word is not exactly a new opinion.

Lying and plagiarizing are the literary equivalents of cheating and beating. They're both dumpable offenses. In the words of a friend who was getting over an ex, James Frey is out of my life and off of my buddy list.

[Tabloid Baby]

Seltzer's adulatory press was her unraveling. After a profile last week in the House & Home section of the Times, Jones' older sister called her publisher to rat her out.

Seltzer told the Times the whole thing started after she spent time with some people from the wrong side of the tracks:

Ms. Seltzer said she had met some gang members during a short stint she said she spent at “Grant” high school “in the Valley.” (A Google search identifies Ulysses S. Grant High School, a school on 34 acres in the Valley Glen neighborhood in the east central San Fernando Valley.) “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”

... Ms. Seltzer, who writes in an author’s note to the book that she “combined characters and changed names, dates, and places,” said that these characters and incidents were in part based on friends’ experiences. “I had a couple of friends who had moms who were like my mom and that’s where Big Mom comes from — from being in the house all the time and watching what goes on. One of my best friend’s little brother was killed two years ago, shot,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks at the corner of Crenshaw and Stockyard. People would come in and say, ‘What are you doing?’ because I would be sitting there all day every day. I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not gang members.”

From before she was caught, here are Seltzer's rules of the street, which she said were conveyed to her by a compatriot in the drug trade. Her publisher would have been wise to follow them, particularly given the moral landscape in the memoir trade these days, which at this point would startle even the most hardened blood or crip:

¶ “Trust no one. Even your own momma will sell you out for the right price or if she gets scared enough.”

¶ “War has no room for diplomacy, war is outright vicious. Never expect mercy and never show it.”

¶ “There is no greater sin in war than ignorance. Never speak or act on anything you aren’t 100 percent sure of, or someone will expose your mistake and take you down for it.”

The saddest thing for Seltzer in all this is that she couldn't drag her deception out just a little bit longer. Her adulatory Times clips had her on track for bestseller status in the mold of A Million Little Pieces, by fellow lying memoirist James Frey. If she had been caught a few months down the road, she would still have been disgraced, but at least would also have had a shot at profiting off her infamy by selling a clearly labeled work of fiction for upwards of $1 million, as Frey did.

Times: Author Admits Acclaimed Memoir Is Fantasy

Related: Review - However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy (Times)

Related: Profile - A Refugee From Gangland (Times)

(Thanks to Josh for the tip.)

See? The top photo is by Jim Krantz, taken for a Marlboro ad. The bottom is a photo of Krantz's photo, taken by Prince. The bottom photo is art!

[Photos: New York Times]

He is also a member of the groups "British Airways Surfboard Ban, BookCourt, and James Frey In My Bed."

"Hey, i know you don't need to hear another fan tell you about how amazing your book was, but i got so into that book, i could never put it down. I never get that way about books, but yours was so detailed and extraordinary. The only thing that made me mad was when i finished reading the book and i was picturing Lilly and you getting married because you went through so much together, but Lilly killed herself the day before you came out of jail. I know life is not a fairytale and the best things don't always happen, but it just seemed so amazing when you two were together. That part was so upsetting, but still.. great job. I can't wait to read 'My Friend Leonard', i asked for it for christmas. :) I really respect you and your way of writing :)," Angie Davy of the Westlane Secondary School network has written on his Wall.

Dry your tears, little Angie Davy! Maybe you'll feel less upset when you realize that "Lily" DID NOT EXIST.

"Any books in the works, Mr. Frey? :)" writes Lara Marsman of Hunter College. Yes, Lara, he does! James got a ton of money to write a forthcoming novel, because the world is fucked. Put it on your Amazon Wish List!

"This is my wall. I think I love my wall," James has written on his own Wall.

He has infected 1 chump, for a total of 25 Vampire Points.

Actually the audience was sort of generally unresponsive, or maybe reverent? Maybe a lot of them were there to see Annie Proulx, who read a long story about, literally, sagebrush. The only rise Junot got out of the crowd was when he introduced a story about cheating on one's girlfriend like so: "As long as you all keep cheating on each other, I'll keep writing this shit!" (Cue little "he-said-shit!" gasps all around.)

The cheating story was, like a lot of Junot's stories, so vividly detailed and so evocative of a specific place and time and culture (central New Jersey, late 80's/early 90's, second-generation Dominican immigrants) that it was hard to believe it wasn't just a diary entry. Obviously, there are a lot of autobio elements in his work, but he's emphatically not a memoirist. What's up with that?, asked a professor during the Q&A: "My students were really shocked to learn that your work was nonfiction. How do you go about making your life into fiction?"

"People tend to like their lies, even if they're big, rather well-organized. If I were writing a memoir, I'd probably be able to get away with exaggerating more," Junot said. "Like, if you say,'this is memoir,' you can then say 'this is the specific number of teeth I had pulled without anesthetic.' But in order to make events from my life believable as as fiction, I had to take so much crazy shit out. It felt like the stories could only hold so much. When I was younger, I didn't have the tools at my disposal to create nine speaking, active characters, which was what was going on in my family! So I was just just responding to the conventions of short fiction. The form requires you to make all sorts of compromises and changes."

"I don't like the tone of that," said one editor at a commercial house. "It suggests that it is the 'people' who have the problem, i.e. they need a 'clearer mind' in order to see the true value of James Frey's writing. The man is a liar and a fake. He may be a good writer—it's not like you have a be a good person to be a good writer. Actually, most writers are horrible people. At the same time, I would have felt icky about paying someone that shady 7 figures. Does morality have any place in a bottom-line business? I'm not sure anymore."

Another editor said, "Well, it sure helps that this is a novel and therefore he won't have the truthiness issue dogging him. So maaaaaybe people will read it, especially if it gets great reviews. But it'll never sell anything near what the memoirs did." She also said she thought that despite Nan Talese's protestations that she'd have loved to see the manuscript, neither Random House nor Penguin would have seriously considered the book, considering how badly they'd been burned.

One book publicist thinks that James has a shot at redemption. "I don't know if 'clarity' is the right word. I don't think people will look at him differently, I just think they'll forget how bad things were... And, as Oprah gets more and more general backlash, I think they'll remember how she laid into him like he was a child molester. I honestly do believe that all the king's horses and all the king's men will be able to [reconstruct James], provided he writes a great book." Hope not!

We'll give one seasoned fiction editor the final word. "I don't know—it depends if you're talking about editors (who are beside the point because the deal's done), the media (who either will have it out for him or will go with the redemption story but probably won't ignore it), or book buyers, who are still buying 'Million Little Pieces' in big numbers every week, you know?"

I bought Frey's book, before The Smoking Gun debunked so much of it, and I liked it. I'm a sucker for confessions. (Hey, even Gawker loved him on first sight, back in January of 2003.) I love writers who specialize in wide-open honesty; it's sort of my favorite thing, actually. My favorite writers—Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Jonathan Ames, David Sedaris, Cookie Mueller, Sylvia Plath, Colette, Mary Gaitskill, Phoebe Gloeckner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Dawn Powell—are all expert confessors.

Oh, and here are the people whose confessions generally rub me the wrong way: Chuck Klosterman, Neal Pollack, Nick Hornby, Steve Almond, Julie Powell, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephanie Klein. The people whose confessions often reek of bragging, even when—especially when—the bragging is along the lines of "look how disgusting/uncool/modest/bad at relationships I am." Or: "look at what a lame person I used to be."

But I liked A Million Little Pieces specifically because James Frey seemed to eschew that kind of self-mythologizing. There was something about the book that just felt... honest. True. Which means, I guess, that Frey is a very talented writer? Or maybe just a very, very talented liar.

Frey didn't just pull an Augusten Burroughs—it's not like the lies were "discrepancies" attributable to "we all have our own personal truths," though he did use nearly that exact lame line. He blatantly wrote about factual things that never occurred as if they'd happened to him, and in doing so, made his readers feel sympathy and vicarious pain. He toyed with our emotions, and when we found out we'd been lied to, we felt betrayed. I did, at least—and, hey, Oprah did! And everyone who said, "well, it's still a really well-written book" seriously has something wrong with them.

But apparently it's a big so-what. Our culture isn't into consequences. Shame is the new fame. What yesterday's news means is that James Frey's career will continue, and as it does, the story of the fraud he perpetrated on four million readers will drift further and further down the page in any profile written about him, until it's in the last paragraph, until it's in the last line, until it's not there at all.

George Saunders, in an essay about how reading Johnny Tremain changed his life, wrote:

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility, or something more diabolical; the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and most importantly, tells us what we really think.

You know that Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin Upton, the one who gave a retarded answer to a stupid question and became an instant YouTube sensation? Last week, the wire services were full of pictures of her, going to fashion shows and parties. She's famous now. In a few more weeks, no one will remember what she originally became famous for. They'll only know that they know her name.