Memoir, Truthiness, and the Power of Oprah

Abstract

After his memoir A Million Little Pieces became a best-selling selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2005, James Frey's meteoric rise as a major writer of the American memoir boom was cut short when it was discovered that he had fabricated some events in the book. The resulting controversy meant that Frey and the memoir as a genre were written off by most of the mainstream press. However, the memoir is closely related to the development of American ideas about individualism and citizenship. As A Million Little Pieces fell afoul of conflicting expectations of memoir as genre, it also became part of a public debate in the USA about the meaning of truth connected to the idea of weapons of mass destruction, the relationship between publishing and television, the image of the addict in American culture, and the value of personal experience in the public realm. This paper explores the debate.

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