1st February 2006, 12:06 PM
The events are still true, he was still arrested but he wasn't beaten by the cops. His girlfriend commited suicide but he never apologized to the father, the events that he describes has the same outcome with over dramatized emotional filler. It makes less sense to call a story with true events a fictional story.
For this particular case the title of 'Semi-non-fiction' and/or 'Based on a true story' would have applied here. And books of such genre sell extremely well. In fact they sell better than full-on autobiography books. So why, if the book would have launched in to a genre where sales were already available, would he have gone with a nonfiction tag? The answer isn't sales, it's that all autobiographies embelish and lie and get away with the '100% accurate' dogma just by getting people to assume that it is. Frey went that same route, as per norm.
Then Oprah got involved, sales the of the book sky rocketed. Now look at what this guy is doing... he's releasing a book talking about his adult life. "I went to prison and got beat up by cops TEH HARDKORE IS ME" etc. To many people who simply cannot stand to see someone proclaim how awesome they are or how 'tough' they are, they want to get other people to despise the same things they do, so they try to descredit him. Poking fun at anything they can until while digging around, they find that some of the emotional filler that Oprah loved so much is actually either embelished or straight-up didn't happen. Like the cops beating him up.
So little Suzy Homemaker and Joan Q. Public read their Oprah book o'the month and fell in love with Frey, just like Oprah did. And then a website releases proof that some of the details (like, 3 of them, in the entire book) are false. The people who cant stand to see a person get credibility pat themselves on the back, the people who fell in love with him throw the book out while the people who only heard about the book after it was going through its death throws dismissed the book entirely, proclaiming Frey a liar and then Oprah has him explain on the show what really happened in those 3 events which of course were boring, unexciting, and disappointing, because that's how real life is.
Some of you should ask yourselves do you get angry when a sports star proclaims how great he is? Acts cocky and full of himself? Do you get angry when a film director acts like he's the jesus Christ of film when you know his films to be boring krap? or when a friend, co-worker etc gets everyone to love him when you know he's a jerk? Because of these few details that are false, inside of true events, you want the book to be placed in the 'Made up story" section of the book store, but the events STILL HAPPENED, he only describes them with more flair and emotional groundings, there's nothing in the book that's wholly fabricated.
He didn't do it for sales, he didn't do it trick anyone. He did what any good writer would do, take the events from real life and make them fun or amazing to read. A good writer can make a story about a snail crossing a sidewalk exciting, but in Frey's case it was a true story about a drug addict and the loss of his girlfriend. And while he didn't get beat up by cops, he was arrested for being disorderly, and while he didn't apologize to the father of the girlfriend, he did feel guilty for not being there for her and probably never got the courage up to apologize to him. So he did it in the book instead. What he did was, instead of giving the reader the true events in fact, he surprised us, motivated us emotionally and gave us entertainment. If he would have put the factual details in, it would have disappointed the reader and the emotional connection would be lost just as it did when he laid out the factual time line and happenings of the details in question on Oprah's show because real life is never fun or amazing to read several hundred pages about even if it's an autobiography about someone truly amazing, the writer still has to give the reader entertainment and follow structure of story telling. Which real life doesn't apply to.
For this particular case the title of 'Semi-non-fiction' and/or 'Based on a true story' would have applied here. And books of such genre sell extremely well. In fact they sell better than full-on autobiography books. So why, if the book would have launched in to a genre where sales were already available, would he have gone with a nonfiction tag? The answer isn't sales, it's that all autobiographies embelish and lie and get away with the '100% accurate' dogma just by getting people to assume that it is. Frey went that same route, as per norm.
Then Oprah got involved, sales the of the book sky rocketed. Now look at what this guy is doing... he's releasing a book talking about his adult life. "I went to prison and got beat up by cops TEH HARDKORE IS ME" etc. To many people who simply cannot stand to see someone proclaim how awesome they are or how 'tough' they are, they want to get other people to despise the same things they do, so they try to descredit him. Poking fun at anything they can until while digging around, they find that some of the emotional filler that Oprah loved so much is actually either embelished or straight-up didn't happen. Like the cops beating him up.
So little Suzy Homemaker and Joan Q. Public read their Oprah book o'the month and fell in love with Frey, just like Oprah did. And then a website releases proof that some of the details (like, 3 of them, in the entire book) are false. The people who cant stand to see a person get credibility pat themselves on the back, the people who fell in love with him throw the book out while the people who only heard about the book after it was going through its death throws dismissed the book entirely, proclaiming Frey a liar and then Oprah has him explain on the show what really happened in those 3 events which of course were boring, unexciting, and disappointing, because that's how real life is.
Some of you should ask yourselves do you get angry when a sports star proclaims how great he is? Acts cocky and full of himself? Do you get angry when a film director acts like he's the jesus Christ of film when you know his films to be boring krap? or when a friend, co-worker etc gets everyone to love him when you know he's a jerk? Because of these few details that are false, inside of true events, you want the book to be placed in the 'Made up story" section of the book store, but the events STILL HAPPENED, he only describes them with more flair and emotional groundings, there's nothing in the book that's wholly fabricated.
He didn't do it for sales, he didn't do it trick anyone. He did what any good writer would do, take the events from real life and make them fun or amazing to read. A good writer can make a story about a snail crossing a sidewalk exciting, but in Frey's case it was a true story about a drug addict and the loss of his girlfriend. And while he didn't get beat up by cops, he was arrested for being disorderly, and while he didn't apologize to the father of the girlfriend, he did feel guilty for not being there for her and probably never got the courage up to apologize to him. So he did it in the book instead. What he did was, instead of giving the reader the true events in fact, he surprised us, motivated us emotionally and gave us entertainment. If he would have put the factual details in, it would have disappointed the reader and the emotional connection would be lost just as it did when he laid out the factual time line and happenings of the details in question on Oprah's show because real life is never fun or amazing to read several hundred pages about even if it's an autobiography about someone truly amazing, the writer still has to give the reader entertainment and follow structure of story telling. Which real life doesn't apply to.