Little Liars

Jim already blogged about James Frey, the frat boy who wrote a book about how he was a bad ass Criminal (with a capital C). Jim even said what I was gonna say about Frey showing up on Larry King Live with his mom. (What, you need your mommy to protect you from Larry King?)

I wish I could say I pegged his memoir for the pure bullshit it is, instead of merely the shitty book I thought it was. I picked up James Frey's book about a year and a half ago, and from the first scene, I thought it was unbelievable. What airline lets a guy board a plane with vomit and blood on his shirt, several teeth freshly missing, and a "hole" in his cheek? I get lied to a lot. It's my job. My first bullshit test is asking myself is can I picture this? Frey couldn't even pass the first sniff test.

But, at first, I thought it might be some hip ironic stylistic choice with the prose settling down as he found sobriety.

But no. I skipped through the book and found he kept writing like that. And writing. Like that. With Sentence Fragments and Words as Sentences. Sentence. Fragments. Like that. For 300 plus Pages.

It was stoopid. I didn't find any "emotional truth," as Oprah likes to describe the book. All I found was a lot of solipsistic repetition, as if that alone is the same thing as reflection. I didn't care whether the author lived through all that. He was too boring for me to continue reading it at Barnes and Noble.

But I'll leave it to someone who actually got through the whole thing to explain to you why I thought it was so bad.

Apparently, some fans are defending the book because it helped people through their addiction. I don't understand. The premise of the book is that addiction is a farce and that you just need to believe in yourself to kick it. Isn't the first step to overcoming addiction acknowledging that you have a problem? I wonder how many people this set back because they tried to deny they had a problem and thought they could hang on to sobriety, just like that Outlaw, James Frey?