I just got done watching Oprah (I've been spending too much time in this damn apartment if I'm watching Oprah now) and it was probably the best hour of comedy for a non-comedy show I had ever seen. If you haven't already read, this author, James Frey, wrote a book called A Million Little Pieces. In this book it talks about his courageous fight from drug and alcohol abuse. It was number one on the New York Best Seller List and it was on Oprah's book club for the longest time. I had people telling me that I had to read it because it changed their lives but I would tell them that I don't have those problems so why should I read it? If it was about a guy who was broke and found the courage to fund a movie...I would read it.
The thing that was so shocking was that this guy apparently had lied about some of it. This website called The Smoking Gun found information on him that he had lied about the time he had spent in jail. They called him out, they called Oprah out James Frey went on Larry King Live to defend himself and who was there in his corner? Oprah. She called in saying that the message behind the book is all that mattered and blah, blah blah.
So now I'm watching this show and Oprah says she is wrong for saying this. She said she was wrong on National TV and all I can think is that who gives a fuck? I really don't care and why am I still watching this but I go on. The author comes out and Oprah asks him what he lied about. The guy tells her that there were times that were changed around. He realizes now that he was wrong.
Ok...so as I'm writing this I'm realizing that I can just sum it up in one paragraph.
This madness, this book. Why God why? How could he do this to us? Will we ever trust anyone again? Oprah you are so courageous to say you were wrong on National TV. Why the fuck is that guy sitting in the audience when everyone else is on stage? I mean, this happens all the time on this show...they have a panel of people talking and out of nowhere they go to the audience and there's that one loner man/woman sitting there. I can't believe I actually sat and watched this whole thing. I really wish Oprah was going to cry, it looked like she was. She said she was so embarrassed. I'd be really embarrassed too if I had a billion dollars and I read a book that wasn't true. Why does it seem like this guy got caught smoking pot at a Church social and now his parents, priest and neighborhood watch are lecturing him why he was wrong? Oprah you are so courageous. Why did I watch this and pass on Cathouse: The Series?
I found this quite amusing because it really didn't mean anything. Will this do anything to Oprah? Fuck no...she's still gonna be rich. Is this going to do anything bad for James Frey? Fuck no...he's still rich and there's that old saying that "Any publicity is good publicity." After watching this show and hearing about the lies, people are going to rush out to read it just to see what he lied about. It's such a strange fucking world we live in.
In a sense, life is the distortion of truth. I may see one thing one way and the guy sitting next to me could see the exact same thing and have a totatlly different memory. Now I'm not defending this guy and I'm not calling him an asshole because as a writer we tend to extend the truth, polish it up to make it seem like the worst/best thing that has ever happened. It's what we do. It's what you, the readers, want us to do. If this was something that was done in the newspapers, ok I would be fucking pissed but in the long run, we read for entertainment. To have something to talk about at the dinner table so you can ask,
"Have you read any good books lately?"
"Yeah, there was this book about this guy who had a drug problem. You should check it out."
We read to escape to a different place. We do read to give us courage and if you find courage in a book that are filled with lies and exaggerated truth(I wasn't referring to The Bible), I don't see any harm in it. If it gets us out of bed, if it keeps us walking towards the silver lining...go to it. Read away.
Oh yeah...I lied about this whole thing. It never really happened.
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17 comments:
exaggeration = memoir
lies = novel
Jimmy wrote a novel and called it a memoir. You can't spend a day in the drunk tank and then spin it into a prison term and call that your life story.
But I'm with Dan. Who cares. Oprah should be banned from reading books anyway. Except mine. Oprah, will you please read my book? Pretty please? I'll change the title to "Oprah is Awesome."
I went to my grandmother's last night, and she is currently reading a copy. She's 81.She's still spry and quick-witted, and wants to be up-to-date with all the latest controversy, particularly if it involves Oprah.
Needless to say, I sat down on the toilet and read the first chapter. Needless to say, I should have wiped my ass with the pages of this book. The guy is a fucking fraud.
Like all contemporary authors, he develops his own "style" by eschewing things like paragraphs and punctuation (Kerouac's 'Subterrainians', anyone?). Tedious, for sure. But that's not what concerned me. I was more alarmed by some serious red flags that popped up in that first chapter.
A twenty-three yro man comes-to on a plane. His parents pick him up at the airport in Chicago. They just happened to be in Detroit that week, but they reside in Tokyo. They drive him several hours north, in Wisconsin,to their family cottage. On the drive, he MUST consume two bottles of wine,and at the cottage, an entire half-gallon of whiskey for our protagonist to get to sleep. In the morning, they decide to take him to America's oldest and most prestigious (read:expensive) rehabs in the country.
Are you with me so far?
An incredibly young man, with an incredibly enormous drug and alcohol habit,from an incredibly well-to-do family, gets dropped off at an incredibly expensive rehab center in an incredibly beautiful area of Minnesota.
Now, considering this asshole has another book out on the market, here's what I read:
Young, upper-middle class, athletic and good-looking young man, from a solid, drama-free family, grows up nuturing a sensitive side. In high school someone gave him a copy of 'A Farwell to Arms' and he falls in, forever swept up in that Hemmingway personae of the gruff exterior protecting a vulnerable heart. And the four-bottles-of-wine-a-day habit is kinda cool, too.
Still with me? Good. Because, at this point he's not any different than most of us were at this age. I'd say he's par for the course.
He enters his college years, and dreams of being a writer, but deep down, he knows there is a problem. Like all white,suburban, would-be artists, he has NOTHING to say. Nada. Even when he does, he knows it's not original. So, he toils, trying to be clever, deep, philosophical, ironic, etc...Our hero is frustrated, but still on track.
Then, one day, like Edison in the lab, he comes upon a discovery, a CATALYST, something that rev's up his neurons and opens his soul wide enough so he can become(gasp!)a medium for 'The Great Voice'!!Yes, ladies and gentlemen...drugs and alcohol will prove to be his lightening rod to the heavens!!
I have been there. Alot of us have. This is natural, and I'm not making fun of myself, or anyone else. But this guy seems to think he's one in a million, hence the sarcastic tone.
Now, I'm not a doctor, or a drug and alcohol counselor, but from what I've read/experienced/seen, it takes a minimun of seven years of hard-drinking to achieve that level of dependency.
I've been on drunks, and I've known many drunks. Real drunks. Like my sixty-five-year-old uncle that hit the bottle at 7am every morning, and would sit at his kitchen table shouting "Nigger!" at young black men as they walked by his house (he lived in Inkster, by the way).
He died when he was at the top of the basement stairs and his pants dropped around his ankles and he fell, face forward, down the steep stairwell, and cracked his skull open on the way down. He was drunk, of course.
He HAD to drink everyday. But,he had been drinking for FORTY FUCKING YEARS.
So our hero goes wild and crazy.Why? For his craft, man! And it's all okay! Why? Because our hero has a built-in saftey mechanisim: Loving, supportive well-to-do parents! I'm not saying they'll pay for his habits, but, by jove, you better believe they'll come to his rescue should he hit rock-bottom! And when he's all cleaned up (from stints in the best retreats that money can buy), he'll come out on the other end totally unscathed, but with something new, that he didn't posses before: He'll have authenticity and street credentials! Hurray! Then, write it up, stretch it out, blend it with the stories he heard in rehab (from some REAL sickos) and sell it!
Nothing left to do now, but count the checks,appear on Oprah and think of youself as an heir to Bukowski's throne. It's a wonderful life!
I suppose I'm just mad that he had the parents to help him out.
That's how he beat me to it.
Dammit.
Exactly Quaig, exactly. This pretty much sums up why I've stopped watching tv and stopped reading fiction. It is all so contrived, forced, and unoriginal.
My literary appreciation stops at about John Updike's third "Rabbit" novel. The reason is that I got tired of reading writers' varying versions of my own life, and literary study. It is most easily detected by watching several episodes of the same dramatic television series. If you pay attention you can tell that different writers have written different scenes. And then you can start to identify the writers by their style and their stories, that then become repetative and annoying. Then it turned into a workshop. I would start talking to the tv or writing in the margins of books, "Why would you put that here, it would go better over here." Or my personal favorite, "You don't need to give this to the reader, it should be left as subtext. You are being too obvious here." Contemporary fiction is far too obvious because it simply a regurgetation of yesterday's contemporary fiction. (I realize that she is not truly a lesbian, and that she is just rebelling against her conservative christian parents by going down on a few dykes. You don't need to spell out her undying secret devotion to her ex-boyfriend to prove it to me that her homosexuality is just a passing phase.) I don't care if the story is set in 17th century England, 19th Century middle America or mid 1990's Los Angeles.
I finally just stopped caring when during a television show I could actually see the scene's author in her real life situation on which the television scene was based. I along with about a billion other people had lived the same scene at the same watershed moment in their lives. What in the hell would I want to waste my time watching her version of the same events for? Or what she wished were her version of the same events?
That being said: I'll let you know when I finally come up with something original myself. Don't hold your breath.
I didn't mean to imply that no in in 'The Bar' is unoriginal. Just meant that this dude did what we all do/did, but managed to cash in on it by being from better circumstances than most of us.
I suggest everyone click on the link Dan has provided to TSG. My favorite part was reading how AMLP was rejected 14 when he tried to sell it as fiction. Then he proceeded to expunge all documents of himself from various records, THEN sold it as a memoir.
I fully endorse Dan's statements about insular realities during shared experiences, but AMLP is over the top.
I meant to say: I didn't mean to imply that anyone in the corner bar is unoriginal...sorry, it's lunch, and I'm eating..
Originality. That's the catch these days. I suffer from unoriginality a lot myself. Anytime I think of something that sounds like an awesome idea to write about I realize I'm just reinterpreting something someone else wrote. At least when I do my professional writing I take comfort in the fact that I'm paid to regurgitate information. Creative writing, that's the bitch.
Even if I never ever take writing where I want it to, I don't ever want to get into the realm of passing off bullshit as something that really happened. Obviously, if we're writing our own biographies there will probably be things we selectively leave out. Making up crap to somehow make ourselves look better is just sad.
Oprah. She was worshipped as a demigod in 1200 BC by the Hitites.
Quaig, I didn't take your comments as accusing us "bar" patrons as unoriginal.
I am just a critical of my own stuff as I am of other's. I see what you are saying and I agree.
This all reminds of the time I got into a fist fight during a drug deal. I ended up killing the guy with my bare hands. I could feel his life escape his body as his bulging eyes rolled back into his no limp head. I held him them there on his knees for a few minutes as I released the grip my hands held around his neck. When I finally mustered the courage to actually let go, my fingers revealed the bruising around the poor man's neck as a brilliant deep purple, like the last ebbs of a summer's day lakeside sunset.
...How do you pronouce that word-hitites- Ancient Simarians and Mesopatanians.
Oprah was the minion of Donohue...
Print is dead.
Dan is on the write path...when all the stories have been told before, change the medium you tell it. Let's all go work in films.After all, 'Jaws' was just 'Moby Dick'...and look where it got that mexican, Speilborgo.
I have just cross-refernced pop culture twice. It is me who is unoriginal. Oh well, back to Ciaro to look for 'The Well of Souls'...
I am eating lunch too and that is why there are a lot of typos in my last comment.
Quaig, contact John_Campbell_is_Funcha@yahoo.com for Irving Berlin memoirs.
I know what you mean, Dave. I post stuff and then immediately get pissed that I didn't proof it. If any of you guys feel the same way, then I know I'm in the company of writers.
Sorry. I just reread my last post and winced. It was unoriginal AND gay.
It was like I went to 'James Frey's Writing Retreat on Brokeback Mountain'.
That's O.K. Quaig. I've signed up for the very same retreat.
I guess I should get the saltine crackers out now and let the Circle Jerk begin.
I wish I had a beer, but I'm still at work.
I think this post just turned into an episode of Oprah.
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