James Frey Sees His New Book Deal Shatter into Little Pieces
Feb 27th, 2006 • Posted in: NewsNEW YORK
James Frey, who was caught fabricating details of his best-selling memoir, has seen his new book deal dissolve.
According to the New York Times, Riverhead Press has backed out of an agreement to publish Frey’s next two books.
Frey admitted that he made up much of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, after an investigative website showed that the details of the book did not mesh with publicly available records.
A Million Little Pieces allegedly detailed how Frey had overcome his alcohol and drug addiction without outside support, and the book had become popular in the self-help genre. It was propelled to the top of the best-seller list by talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who recently — in what proved to be an embarrassment — publicly defended “the essential truth” of the book.
She later publicly castigated Frey on her program.
Riverhead Press originally announced the two-book deal on Jan. 5, according to the Chicago Tribune and the International Herald Tribune. Three days later, thesmokinggun.com published evidence that Frey invented many of the memoir’s details.
The amount of the deal was undisclosed, and neither the publisher nor a spokeswoman for the author elaborated on the cancellation of the contract, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
Also last week, a woman filed a federal lawsuit to prevent three publishing companies and a bookstore chain from advertising Frey’s book as a memoir. The suit, which is seeking class-action status, claims that the publishers and the bookseller engaged in consumer fraud because they should have known that A Million Little Pieces was fiction, not fact, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
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