Week 7 Prompt Response

I was a new library worker in 2005 when James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (initially published by Doubleday in 2003) became an Oprah pick and, thus, an overnight sensation. The harrowing tale of drug abuse, rehab, and trauma was simply captivating. I remember devouring the book and watching Frey be interviewed on Oprah. The iconic cover, the single hand covered in a seemingly infinite number of tiny, multi-colored sprinkles, was itself a piece of marketing genius. Patrons got in line, so to speak, placing the book on hold in record numbers and preparing to wait months for their turn to read it. Frey had struck gold, telling his personal tale of addiction and loss and writing and speaking so honestly about it that nobody considered it was anything but a true story.

Until we learned that it wasn’t.

In early 2006, the literary world was rocked by the news that this bestselling, Oprah-backed memoir wasn’t really a memoir at all. (Wikipedia has a good, quick overview of the controversy for those not as familiar.) Frey had fabricated huge portions of the book and Oprah made him come back to the show, with his publisher, and answer rounds of questions about the lack of truth in the book that had been marketed as a memoir. Before many of our patrons could even get their chance to read it, the book’s fame was tarnished.

I remember my initial thoughts when I learned that the “memoir” wasn’t really based in fact (as one expects a memoir to be). I wondered why on earth Frey hadn’t just sold the book as a novel, even if it was loosely based on parts of his life. It was so well-written that it would surely have been celebrated as a novel and Frey wouldn’t have had to deal with the shameful aftermath of the world discovering his lie. Why did his publisher not get to the bottom of this prior to selling it as a memoir? More critical for the library, did this mean that the book was now fiction? Should it be re-cataloged as fiction?

Because it has been 14 years, (and I had an infant and a four year old at the time - meaning that my memories from that time period are clouded by sleep depravity), I don’t remember what our library did about re-cataloging the book. A quick search today of the local consortium’s catalog shows me that the book is currently cataloged differently in different libraries, everything from Fiction, to Biography, to 362.29 in non-fiction. Obviously, this has been a discussion in many different libraries over the years, and the answer is anything but clear.

Writing for Barnes and Noble, Jeff Somers states that A Million Little Pieces, despite the controversy, is still a book worth reading. I just cannot agree with this assertion. For me, having read it as a “believer” first, I cannot go back to it with an open mind. If a patron asked me about it, I would tell them that it is very well-written but that it is essentially fiction and should be read as such. If I worked in a library that housed the book in Biography, I might lobby to move it to Fiction. However, the publisher still categorizes it as “biography & memoir” which is rather bold after all of the controversy that surrounded the book over a decade ago. Worldcat notes that newer printings of the book include a preface that discusses how Frey’s memoir is “his story, told in his own way”. Worldcat also notably lists genres for the book as both “literary hoaxes” and “biogrpahy”... a unique mix of genres, to be sure!


References

A million little pieces. (2019, January 20). Retrieved from https://www.worldcat.org/title/million-little-pieces/oclc/51223590


A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/56429/a-million-little-pieces-by-james-frey/978030727690


A Million Little Pieces. (2018, December 22). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Little_Pieces


Somers, J. (2017, December 18). 5 Hoax Memoirs Still Worth Reading. Retrieved from https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/5-hoax-memoirs-still-worth-reading/