I think that if stories were told always exactly as they really happened most of them would be really boring.” To tell a story effectively you manipulate information.
I thought in doing that it was OK to take certain licences. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. “Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard,” Frey told The Guardian in 2006. Looked at today, such a horrified and angry reaction to a lie seems almost quaint. This was an era, after all, in which truth was considered sacred, and the idea of a figure not being entirely truthful about something warranted public flogging. Just as Goody’s racism towards Shilpa Shetty – in an era of Blairite delusion that the UK’s problems with classism and racism were a thing of the past – appeared like something truly shocking, we couldn’t quite believe that such a popular public figure had presented an untruth in the way Frey had. It was a scandal that, like the recent reappraisal of the rise and racism-assisted fall of Jade Goody, works as an unexpected time capsule of what constituted a pop culture crisis in the years immediately preceding Twitter.
It is therefore a more traditional addiction/rehabilitation film, one that brings to mind an important question: without acknowledging the literary forgery accusations that engulfed it, what actually is A Million Little Pieces anymore? Outside of an opening quote from Mark Twain that reads “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened”, nothing untoward is even hinted at. It is a well-made and well-acted drama, brought to the screen by artist and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson and her actor husband Aaron, who plays Frey, but curiously excludes everything about the book’s post-publication journey. Thirteen years after that infamous Oprah interview, broadcast months after she had effusively praised Frey’s book and turned it into a phenomenon via her book blub, A Million Little Pieces has been adapted into a film. The most captivating element of its existence is the noise that surrounds it – the accusations that it was largely faked, despite being marketed as a memoir, the literary-world war of words over its editing, and the piercing, terrifying glare of Oprah Winfrey, who elegantly destroyed Frey on live television over his apparent betrayal. It is also the least fascinating thing about A Million Little Pieces. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is a sprawling and manic novel about addiction, survival and redemption.
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