I'm a little behind on the whole "James Frey Made Up A Million Little Pieces" meme, but I've had a thought. It doesn't matter than he added color to his stories. I haven't read the book, but I'm sure that the meaning behind the massaged text is clearer after it was, uh, massaged, which is the whole point. You don't read a book based on the accuracy of the fact-checking; you read it because it affects you.

One of my favorite authors, Tim O'Brien, made this point quite clearly in his work of "non-fiction", The Things They Carried. The book is a collection of memoirs and stories from his time in the Vietnam War. The stories are often heart-wrenching, even though he admits in the book that he made up facts and supporting details.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

For me, this had no impact on my feelings about these stories. Others in my class (I read it in high school) felt differently. By knowing that things had been made up, the story had lost meaning. Some admitted that the story was only interesting because they thought it really happened. Others felt manipulated.

Unlike Tim O'Brien, James Frey was not trying to include his thoughts on the ethics of memoir writing. He was telling a story as if it was truth and denied he fabricated portions of the book when confronted. This is why people were upset. If you go on Oprah and retell the horrors of your youth, they better well be true.

And so, I have absolutely no sympathy for the man.