never could bring myself to read it
Hillary Frey at Salon's broadsheet called out this James Frey BS back in 2005, yo:
In October, I wrote that "A Million Little Pieces" -- which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and is being made into a film -- is nothing more than "the story of a spoiled boy from the suburbs who nearly lost his life, and then cashed in on his mistakes and the misery he caused to so many people around him." I stand by that, although now I'm not even sure that Frey made the mistakes that he's made millions of dollars from.
These stories about the suffering of men get taken so seriously--again, it was amazing to me how some reviews of Girly emphasized the drug bits when it was mostly only some Californian teenagers smoking pot. Oh, so nihilistic! Jesus--I have a freaking goddess in there narrating whole chapters, letting the reader and the characters know that no matter what this universe is oozing with love if you can grab it. (Which you can, most of the time, certainly if you're a rich white American). It gave me a bit of a giggle that some reviewers were so ready to ship Girly off to the Joy Division of the Sylvia Plath Prozac PMDD Wing. Whereas a man vomiting all over an airline & Courtney-loving his way across the US is, if writer is young rich and white and can reasonably put together sentences from his liberal arts education, automatically serious literature.
Frey played to this marketing slot that exists: the suffering of a rich boy from the suburbs. It is real suffering, for sure, that is at the root of these books: my heart broke to read about Dave Eggers's parents' deaths.
Yet it seems to help the book's sales if the suffering is expanded beyond reality.
And JT Leroy aka that socal worker woman from San Francisco who created "him" knew that a boy suffering prostitution at a truck stop is so much more salable than a girl suffering the same.
This is the trick: you get to access your readers' sympathy while still maintaining the more financially and critically valuable narrative of a guy.
Awwww.