An Oprah's Book Club recommendation can send a book soaring on the best-seller lists. The club has been getting some bad publicity because an "autobiography" it recommended is alleged to have been largely fabricated. The Smoking Gun Web site alleges that author James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" might be as much fiction as life story.
What's interesting is that Frey paints himself to be a very bad boy who went through wrenching changes and finally found the light. But according to the allegations, he really wasn't that bad and might have made up, or greatly exaggerated, the incidents that put outside the mainstream of decent society (which makes the headline on the story I linked to wrong. Instead of "Too good to be true," it should be "Too bad to be true").
Remember when people embellished their life stories by leaving out the bad stuff to make themselves seem better than they were? The Frey story says much about our voyeuristic society and what George Will has called our therapeutic culture.
