Million Little Fibs?

I'd posted a few months back on my impressions of James Frey's "Million Little Pieces". It was originally marketed at a "novel" to a dozen publishers and declined. Then his agent suggested to market it as a "memoir" and suddenly it's snapped up and is the talk of the town -- especially after Oprah adds it to her golden Book Club.

Now it looks like there were a few fabrications in the book, as exposed by TSG (The Smoking Gun) website. And an interview on Larry King live as well, recently, alleging that he's not as "bad" as he wrote himself to be.

So here's the question. When a writer is telling a "memoir", how many little embellishments is too many? Writers embellish. They dress up boring, cold-hardened facts. They're the storytellers. Do I think all of David Sedaris's "Me Talk Pretty One Day" is Bible-swearin' God-honest truth? Naw, probably not. Same for Augusten Burroughs's "Running with Scissors". In fact he's being sued for libel and fraud for his.



I think it takes a little of the romance and fun out of a book by going down the line and stating "Well this was fact, this was not, this didn't *quite* happen that way."... and so on. Writers aren't journalists. They're writers. Especially in the novelist/memoir genre. I think there's a few things from my growing up that would be made much more hilarious with a few nifty twists. I would think it's a little naive to assume that the memoir you're enjoying while drinking cocoa on a Saturday morning is going to be as factual as the Newsweek sitting in your mailbox.