The Awful Untruth

On Monday, Jan. 16, Nan Talese was on vacation in Bermuda with her husband, the nonfiction writer Gay Talese. It was Ms. Talese’s imprint at Doubleday that published James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces in hardcover, and she had something to add to the still-evolving controversy.“When the manuscript of A Million Little Pieces was received by us at Doubleday, it was received as nonfiction, as a memoir,” said Ms. Talese by phone. “Throughout the whole process of publication, it had always been a memoir, and for the first year and a half it was on sale, it was always a memoir with no disputation. It was never once discussed as fiction by me or anyone in my office.”

Ms. Talese’s statement appears to contradict Mr. Frey, who has said that it was his publisher’s decision to foist A Million Little Pieces onto the public as a memoir rather than a novel, as he had originally written it. Just a few days ago, during an unrepentant appearance on Larry King Live, Mr. Frey said: “We initially shopped the book as a novel, and it was turned down by a lot of publishers as a novel or as a nonfiction book. When Nan Talese purchased the book, I’m not sure if they knew what they were going to publish it as. We talked about what to publish it as. And they thought the best thing to do was publish it as a memoir.”

Ms. Talese said that she “almost collapsed” when she heard Mr. Frey make that statement. (Mr. Frey, as well as his editor, Sean McDonald, who is now at Riverhead, and his agent, Kassie Evashevski, didn’t respond to calls from The Observer.) Critics and journalists have since repeated Mr. Frey’s claim, citing it as evidence that the publishing industry and its craven marketing decisions are to blame for the fact that elements of Mr. Frey’s book are, in fact, not true.

Still, Ms. Talese—an esteemed veteran of the publishing world—remains unapologetic for whatever role she did play in the book’s production and subsequent popularity as a bible of addiction recovery. She said that there were never any doubts raised during the publishing process—at least with her—about the book’s veracity, and that the only real editorial change made to the manuscript was the cutting of about 100 pages, which was done by Mr. Frey and Mr. McDonald.

If Mr. Frey came to Ms. Talese today with the same manuscript, she said she’d publish it the same way, most likely with a disclaimer in the front. (In any case, she said that the book would never have worked as a novel, in part because the author himself is the only real character in it.) She added that if Mr. Frey had confessed prior to publication to the fabrications revealed by the Smoking Gun last week, she would have excised them from the book. A transgression had been committed, Ms. Talese acknowledged, but the person responsible was Mr. Frey. “I don’t think it is ever a good idea to purposely distort the truth,” she said.

When asked whether she would do anything differently in terms of publishing nonfiction and memoirs in the future, Ms. Talese said: “Absolutely not.”

Not surprisingly, the scandal has only been good for business. According to a source at the company, Doubleday just went back to press on A Million Little Pieces in hardcover (the popular explanation is that the recent intrigue has prompted those who own the book in paperback to want it in hardcover, too).

According to a Doubleday/Anchor spokesperson, in response to these recent allegations, “James is writing an ‘Author’s Note’ that will appear in future reprints of both the hardcover and paperback editions of A Million Little Pieces.” The book will appear at No. 15 on The New York Times’ Jan. 22 hardcover best-seller list.

According to the source at the company, there had been some disagreement among editors at the publishing house about Mr. Frey’s authenticity, but the early dissenters had been silenced by the book’s success, both pre- and post-Oprah.

THE VAST DIVIDE BETWEEN CRITICS, journalists and nonfiction writers horrified by Mr. Frey’s unapologetic misrepresentation of himself, and members of the publishing industry who have cynically shrugged it off, was evident within the confines of Ms. Talese’s own Bermuda hotel room. As Ms. Talese was speaking, her husband was pacing in the background, interjecting the occasional remark. Before handing the phone over to his wife and temporarily leaving the room, Mr. Talese said that what Mr. Frey had done was unacceptable.

“We do not want people to intrude upon our world of nonfiction, saying they’re nonfiction writers when they want the benefits of nonfiction, and then to take off and do what would more properly be called fiction, or exaggeration or falsification,” said Mr. Talese, who characterized his own upcoming book, A Writer’s Life, as a memoir.

“It’s not outrage—it’s a sense of betrayal, or a sense of disrespect,” Mr. Talese continued. “Writers who take their time and do it well—the David Halberstams, the Robert Caros, the people that are my age—we respect greatly because they are doing the very best that can be done to get the facts right. I respect that. And I do not respect those who shortcut, and who exaggerate …. I believe we are to be respected for the effort we make to remain real, to remain verifiable, to have people like you check on us and nail us. It’s easier to be sloppy and shortcut.”

In recent stories in The New York Times and USA Today, among others, New Journalism has been blamed for Mr. Frey’s abuse of reality. Mr. Talese said that he was always grateful to be considered a New Journalist and disputed any relationship between journalists like himself and authors like Mr. Frey.

“If they want to exaggerate, that’s O.K., you can be a fiction writer—that’s fine,” Mr. Talese said. “But I don’t want to be having lunch with them when they do that. I want fiction to be one thing and nonfiction to be another thing. I want it to be identifiable.”

Fellow New Journalist Tom Wolfe agreed with Mr. Talese, even expressing some skepticism about the entire genre.

“Let me tell you something—George Orwell, probably back in the 1950’s, wrote that autobiography is the most outrageous form of fiction. It always has been, and probably always will be, and usually there’s no blogger to catch them,” said Mr. Wolfe. “It has nothing to do with the New Journalism.

“I mean, if it’s gonna be called ‘nonfiction,’ I don’t think there should be any doubt about it,” he added.

The fact that the distinction between truth and fiction isn’t entirely clear suggests that it’s a dark moment for the book-publishing business—not that the book-publishing business is willing to acknowledge it. Their blasé attitude has left those in the broader literary world frustrated and bitter and … prone to making jokes.

On the evening of Saturday, Jan. 14, a group of literary eggheads assembled at a bookstore on Prince Street to toast this year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards nominees.

“Regarding the scandal which should not be named … ,” began the critic Daniel Mendelsohn, a classics scholar who contributes to The New York Review of Books. He stood before a crowd of writers and book reviewers that included Colson Whitehead, Joyce Johnson and Richard Howard. “It serves as a reminder that the role of people who do what we do is to be able to tell the difference between lies and truth, and to identify in all of literature the good from the bad.”

The highbrow types in the audience were uncharacteristically punchy. When the writer Edmund White emerged to announce the NBCC’s creation of a new category for memoir (“biography” and “autobiography” were formerly lumped into one), someone snickered, “You mean fiction!”

Reached later by phone, Mr. Mendelsohn explained his thinking on the subject: “It’s not so much that this guy lied and invented stuff—I mean, this has been going on forever,” Mr. Mendelsohn said. “But the way that people are receiving it, the curious lack of a really outraged response on the part of readers and a lot of other people …. I think the inability to call a spade a spade and just say flat out that this guy lied to his public in order to give himself a more dramatic story is in some sense a reflection of the overall debasement of criticism in the culture at large.”

Jonathan Galassi, the publisher of the small and serious Farrar, Strauss and Giroux—the house whose book, Night by Elie Wiesel, was just announced as Oprah’s next book-club selection—had been out of town for most of the episode. “[Frey] is talking about his own personal experience, which he’s projecting in a very poeticized way,” Mr. Galassi said. “I kind of understand what Oprah is saying—that the basic message of the book is something that she can buy into, whether or not he enhanced certain things for dramatic effect.” Mr. Galassi added that the problem “would have been obviated by saying up front what you’re doing.” People are sometimes “reluctant to reveal their trade secrets” by putting disclaimers in books, Mr. Galassi said. “From a somewhat longer perspective, it’s not worth it.”

He added, however, that, in general, he agrees with Mr. Talese.

“I would say, the closer to reality it is, the better it is,” Mr. Galassi said. “But that’s an artistic matter. I don’t think that it’s a great crime to change this or that, but I think it weakens your book.”

Mostly, it’s writers who have been left feeling deeply injured by the great Frey–debacle.

“Something that I feel very strongly about, as a writer of memoir and narrative nonfiction,” said Mr. Mendelsohn, “is that this guy has betrayed not only what shreds of conscience and integrity he may have—not only betrayed his readers, who he clearly doesn’t care about—but has betrayed the whole enterprise of memoir and nonfiction, because it means every time somebody picks up a book written by somebody who writes this kind of stuff, they’re less likely to believe it.”