No: it’s a Freymoir!
Even better: we’re now using cathartic television to help us recover from the trauma caused by . . . cathartic television. Oprah feels “duped.” Frey ‘splains it all was a “coping mechanism.”
Meanwhile, back in the real world, A Million Little Pieces languishes at #4 on Amazon.
No word on whether Amazon plans to re-tag the book as Literature and Fiction instead of Biographies and Memoirs. Or get rid of the now-embarrassingly-dated editorial reviews.
(Gawker live-blogged the show, if you’re interested in a minute-by-minute.)
Update: Also meanwhile, my dog training book is enjoying an Amazon ranking dip so deep it’s scraping barnacles off its belly. Maybe I should post about how naughty my dog is???? Secret’s out! I caught her gnawing a wooden block today! That is NOT a chew toy!
Interesting that Hemmingway and Keroauc wrote thinly veiled novels that were nothing but memoires with the names changed. No one really cared. Then this guy writes a memoire with some embelishment and its the end of literature.
Wanna read something good?
Check out: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Thanks for the rec! It happens I’m just gearing up to make a book buy :-)
One big difference between the Hemingway/Kerouac reception and Frey’s is the sensibilities of their respective audiences. Frey’s book targeted readers primed for a confessional. H&K’s wanted something else. Contemporary transporting realism. Heh. So yeah, they’re measured by different yardsticks.
I read a few chick-y memoirs some years back, like Liar’s Club, and enjoyed them, but I read them more as literature than memoirs.
I don’t really care about Frey one way or the other, myself. I find the whole thing amusing, including the obligatory outrage. It might be fun to satirize his book tho.