Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude (someone cue up the Avenue Q soundtrack!) is certainly not the most pure of human emotions, but that doesn’t make it any less sweet. Don’t we all sometimes love to see bad things happen to other people? The highlight of last year’s Orange Bowl wasn’t USC beating the hell out of Oklahoma (though I loved that), it was Ashley Simpson getting booed at halftime. I know I’m not only speaking for myself here.

So it has been with a tiny bit of glee that I’ve observed this week’s “outing” of all the BS in Oprah’s current book club selection, “A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey. (In short: Frey’s book is a supposed memoir of his adolescent life as a drug addict and criminal. Except that it’s now clear that Frey was at most a petty criminal and basically completely oversells his hardcore cred in the book.)

I read the book several years ago and didn’t much like it then, not because I had any sense of the non-truths in it, but mostly because I didn’t think Frey was a very good writer. Moreover, I had not too much earlier read a much better memoir, largely but not wholly about addiction and recovery, called “The Black Veil” by Rick Moody.

But most of all, Frey’s book was self-aggrandizing and – worse – hypocritical. Consider the section of the book when Frey is at a rehab clinic and a former patient of the clinic – an unidentified but well-known rock star – comes to talk to the current patients. The rock star claims to have consumed pounds of drugs on a daily basis – enough, it seemed to me, to kill a football team let alone a skinny punk. But that was the point – the rock star was over-embellishing his story to the point of ridiculousness. Frey lashed out against the rock star and writes of a fantasy in which he beats up the rock star for spewing such obvious and over-inflated BS. Which is pretty fucking ironic, no?

Personally, I have no moral qualm with some bits of fiction creeping into memoir. Any history is written from a point of view. But then again, Frey’s argument that he’s simply telling his own story as he remembers it is just laughable. Then he went on Larry King and offered up a defense along the lines of Clinton’s “it depends on what you think the definition of ‘is’ is.”

But what really annoys me are those who are sticking by him, especially Oprah. I understand she’s no desire to be made to look like a chump, but she’s turned on authors she’s picked before, and for less – just ask Jonathan Franzen. When Frey appeared on Larry King, Oprah called in and defended the author. Her feeling was that, no matter the facts of the story, the ‘inspirational value’ of reading the book is nonetheless the same. And I’m sorry but that’s just crap.

I didn’t find much of inspirational value in “A Million Little Pieces” to begin with; remember that in the book he proclaimed contempt for the rock star who over-inflated his story. That detail has stuck with me ever since because it didn’t mesh with an author who seemed all too-eager to “brag” about his own bad boy exploits before getting clean. And that was before I knew he’d made the “bad boy” shit up, for the most part. (In retrospect, that Frey’s story has a lot of fiction in it shouldn’t surprise anyone – he tried to sell the book as a novel before one publisher finally suggested he try calling it a memoir instead.)

As I recall, the inspirational message Frey tried to impart with his book was essentially that addicts aren’t victims – they only have themselves to blame and in the end only they can save themselves. I’ve got no quarrel with that message personally, I’m a big believer that we make our own destinies. I just never liked how Frey made his argument. (His crappy writing was another issue, but let’s not get into that.)

So what do we make of someone who has now all but admitted that the hole he had to pull himself out of wasn’t nearly as dark or deep as he previously claimed? Addiction of any type is hard to beat and there’s probably value in Frey’s actual life story. So what made him embellish?

My theory is that, never mind his rhetoric, Frey is ashamed of his actions. If I recall correctly, he was not raised in poverty, or beaten by his parents, or abused, or any of those typical social ills that we might expect would lead someone to a life of drugs and crime. This would explain his insistence that addicts have no one to blame but themselves. Without a suitably adequate reason for getting into drugs in the first place, he compensated by making his addiction and recovery all the more remarkable. The end result was that – to me at least, though not apparently to Oprah – the whole thing just rang false.

Maybe some people actually responded to that air of unbelievablity, and it increased their depth of response. I’ve read a lot of non fiction that has affected me that way – the more unusual and stunning something is, the more your remember it. But there’s a line between the unbelievably true and that which smacks of fiction – or, as in this case, trying too hard. Frey crossed the line. It was one thing for me to have that visceral reaction and not like the book when I read it two years ago – then I could still respect those who were moved by the story. Now I don’t.

Fiction has it’s place. It is often moving and wonderful. As I’ve written before, I believe strongly in the powers of fiction. But good fiction is not deliberately manipulative. And it is labeled as fiction. A Million Little Pieces broke both rules. So let the public shaming continue.