Ethics Newsline®

NEW YORK
The ethics of disguising fiction as fact were debated throughout the publishing industry last week, as the memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” a best-selling tale of recovery from substance abuse, was attacked as being largely exaggerated or fabricated.

Comparing author James Frey’s claims about his arrests and jail time to actual police records, thesmokinggun.com website said it was unable to substantiate some of the major incidents reported in the book.

Publishers Weekly, a book-industry trade journal, soon followed up, and within a week, the story had moved to the mainstream media, prompting many who had viewed the book as an inspiration in their own battles with addiction to express a sense of outrage and betrayal, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Frey appeared last week on Larry King’s TV program, saying that he stood by “the essential truth” of the book while admitting to 18 pages of “embellishments,” according to a report from Newsweek.

Newsweek also said that Frey, a screenwriter, had originally tried to market the work as a novel, with no success, but sold the book after he began calling it a memoir.

Eventually, the book made Frey a star of the self-help world and was touted by Oprah Winfrey. In a surprise call on the Larry King program, Winfrey said she still supported Frey because the disputed passages comprised less than 5 percent of the book, ABC News reported.