Song of the Week: “Little Lies,” by Fleetwood Mac - “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies”
In October of 2005, the author James Frey appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote his memoir A Million Little Pieces, which she had picked for her book club.1 In the episode, Oprah talked about how the book - a harrowing account of Frey’s youth lost to drug addiction - had kept her awake two nights in a row reading it.
In the interview, Frey reflected on how he had been “the child you pray you never have to raise.” In high school, his drinking led to a catastrophic car accident that killed his friend. In college, he took meth, did cocaine, huffed glue and nitrous oxide, smoked PCP, and ate mushrooms. One of his girlfriends committed suicide and he found her body. He spent time in federal prison for multiple felonies, and was still wanted in three states. And, of course, he included all the gory details, with great bravado, in his memoir.
Though A Million Little Pieces had come out two years earlier to good review from critics, the Oprah Book Club pick catapulted it to success. It spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
And then, in January of 2006, the website The Smoking Gun published an exposé titled “A Million Little Lies.” James Frey, they said, was a liar and a fraud. There were no warrants out for his arrest, and the closest he had ever come to going to prison was spending a couple hours at a small-town police station in Ohio waiting for a friend to post his $733 bond after being caught drunk driving in college. There was no record of him doing hard drugs in university, and - as a blog post from Steven Levitt would reveal a week later - no evidence that his dead girlfriend ever existed.
Perhaps most hurtfully, while two teenage girls from Frey’s hometown did die in a tragic car accident, Frey had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t even their friend.
Oprah, understandably, was furious, both with Frey and with Frey’s editor Nan Talese, who had assured the show of the memoir’s veracity despite later admitting to have done no fact-checking. On January 26, Oprah brought James Frey back onto her show and publicly excoriated him for lying.2 “It is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped,” she said to him. “But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”
When I taught a class on life writing at the University of Colorado Boulder, I always opened the semester by telling the story of James Frey and A Million Little Pieces. I explained how, in the 1970s, the French memoir theorist Philippe Lejeune outlined what he called le pacte autobiographique, or “the autobiographical pact”: “the engagement that an author takes to narrate his life directly (her life, or a part of it, an aspect of it) in a spirit of truth.”
But what, exactly, is “a spirit of truth”? We can likely all agree that James Frey violated it, but not every case is so cut-and-dried. Who do we hold accountable to the “spirit of truth”? Why should we care? And what happens to us - to our beliefs, our understandings of the world around us, and our relationships to each other - if the truth no longer matters?
Emotional Truths
There is no such thing as an entirely accurate memoir. While writers can draw on journals, documents, and family members to help verify memories, all autobiographical writing is inherently reconstruction. A writer might unconsciously or consciously combine events, smooth over details, or rewrite conversations to be more eloquent, and to a certain extent, that is to be expected. It’s what we sometimes call “artistic license,” and most of us have used it in small ways while telling a funny story at a party, or relating a more G-rated version of events to a child.
It doesn’t take a scholar of memoir to understand that perspective is subjective; there’s practically an entire sub-genre of books, movies, and TV episodes in which the same event (often a crime) is narrated from multiple perspectives while a detective (and, usually, the audience) struggles to figure out what really happened.
My favorite example of this is Apple TV’s murder mystery comedy The Afterparty, which follows the investigation into a suspicious death after a high school reunion. In each episode, a different witness shares their narrative of events - and the show changes genre to match that narrative. For Aniq, who hopes to reconnect with his high school crush, it’s a romantic comedy. For his best friend Yasper, an aspiring singer, it’s a musical.
The Afterparty creatively demonstrates how difficult it can be to determine objective truth. Our memories are shaped by our expectations, our desires, and our priorities. But just because we believe something - because it feels true to us - is that enough?
Last year, when the comedian Hasan Minhaj was under consideration as the next host of The Daily Show, The New Yorker’s Clare Malone wrote a profile about him. Minhaj, an Indian-American comedian who grew up Muslim in California, has achieved widespread recognition for his stand-up that combines comedy with social critique about the racism and Islamophobia he has faced throughout his life.
In the profile, Malone claimed that several key moments from Minhaj’s standup were fabricated or grossly exaggerated: most egregiously, an account of an undercover FBI agent infiltrating his family’s mosque after 9/11, and a story about someone mailing him anthrax, which spilled on his young daughter and required her to be hospitalized.
When pressed, Minhaj admitted that - while he did receive white powder in the mail once - it wasn’t anthrax, and none spilled on his daughter. Other stories, he said, came from things that happened to friends and family, not to him directly. “My comedy ‘Arnold Palmer’ is seventy percent emotional truth - this happened - and then thirty percent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction,” he told Malone.
In the wake of the article, Minhaj’s fans and critics argued over whether it mattered that some of his stories were fabricated. Minhaj, after all, is a stand-up comedian, and comedians embellish stories all the time for effect. Crucially, however, Minhaj is a comedian making pointed social critiques about Islamophobia in the United States. His specials don’t just contain jokes; they also contain truth claims about bigotry and inequality in our society.
Islamophobia, to be clear, is absolutely a real thing, and it was particularly rampant in the years immediately following 9/11. That is why, for me at least, Minhaj’s fraudulent claims are particularly concerning; they make it easier for skeptics to cast doubt on very real prejudice.
It’s tempting to dismiss fabrications and half-truths when they come from someone we like, who agrees with us; but if we do so, do we lose the moral authority to call those lies out in our opponents?
Truthiness
Stephen Colbert, who was once also a regular correspondent on The Daily Show, famously coined a word that I find useful here: “truthiness.” Truthiness, which Colbert introduced in the 2005 pilot episode of his satirical show The Colbert Report, is the assertion that a statement is truth based on an individual’s feeling or belief that it is true, regardless of whether it is supported (or indeed, contradicted) by the facts.3
As Colbert explained in a January 2006 interview with The A. V. Club:
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?
Colbert, of course, was talking about George W. Bush, who was president at the time. Ten years later, however, the public was confronted with a political candidate who made Bush’s truthiness look like small potatoes: Donald J. Trump.
Trump is a prolific, compulsive liar, who brashly and routinely lies about everything from world events to the size of the crowd at his inauguration. During the first year of his presidency, The New York Times kept an exhaustive list of every public lie Trump told, which you can see in staggering detail here. “There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths,” write David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson. “Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president - of either party - has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant [emphasis mine].”
In the early stages of the Republican primaries, Trump’s competitors for the presidency sometimes called him on his whoppers. By the time he received the nomination at the 2016 RNC, however, he was beginning to reshape the reality of the Republican Party in lasting ways.
That reshaping is demonstrated vividly by this clip from the 2016 RNC, in which CNN journalist Alisyn Camerota speaks to Newt Gingrich about Republican rhetoric regarding crime. Despite the gloom-and-doom picture painted by Trump, Camerota says, statistics show that violent crime is down across the United States.
“The average American, I will bet you this morning, does not think that crime is down, does not think they are safer,” Gingrich says.
“But we are safer, and it is down,” Camerota replies.
“No, that’s your view,” Gingrich insists.
“These are national FBI facts - statistics,” Camerota says.
“Well, what I said is also a fact…the current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically may be right, but it’s not where human beings are.”
“Hold on,” Camerota presses. “You’re saying that liberals use these numbers, that they use this sort of magic math. These are the FBI statistics. They’re not a liberal organization. They’re a crime-fighting organization…People feel it, but the facts don’t support it.”
“Fine,” Gingrich says. “As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel, and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.”
After Trump was elected president, his staffers found other ways to normalize a culture of lying. His claims weren’t lies, his staffer Kellyanne Conway famously said, they were “alternative facts.”
Seven years later, Trump is still lying boldly, unrepentantly, and with devastating effects. During the September 10 presidential debate, Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating residents’ cats and dogs. The completely unsubstantiated claim, which has its roots in a long and ignoble tradition of racist rumors about Asian immigrants, has had very real consequences for the residents of Springfield: in the last week and a half, there have been at least thirty-three bomb threats against buildings and organizations in the town, and the local schools have repeatedly had to close.
In a September 15 interview, Trump’s running mate J. D. Vance admitted that the claim about immigrants eating pets was made up - and then said it didn’t matter. “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
A Lie Can Travel
The problem of misinformation (innocently shared lies) and disinformation (maliciously shared lies) is not a new one. In 1919, the American humorist Mark Twain famously quipped that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
Well, except for one problem: Mark Twain died in 1910, nine years before the quotation appeared in print attributed to him. And, as the fantastic website Quote Investigator traces, versions of the sentiment appear with various attributions for a full two hundred years before that. In a 1710 issue of The Examiner, Jonathan Swift wrote:
Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be beliv’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
Around a hundred years later, Truth adds a pair of boots, and another century later, the saying - ironically - was attributed to Mark Twain.
But I digress.4 The sentiment is not new. Our ability to circulate lies, however - at a pace and volume and persuasiveness heretofore unseen in human history - is.
There’s a meme from the children’s show Arthur that I keep pinned to my bulletin board at work:
I have discovered again and again while writing Syllabus how easily myths and mistakes get baptized into truth via the internet. In a game of virtual telephone, one person copies another who copies another, and along the way details change and disappear. While I do my best from week-to-week to cite my sources and check all my facts, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself.
But what I find particularly egregious - and sinister - is the ways in which people intentionally use the power of the internet to lie.
On TikTok, I’ve repeatedly encountered videos reporting larger-than-life stories of karmic justice in local news, which are widely and eagerly shared. Only when you click back to the creator’s profile do you discover that he quietly labels his content as “satire” as a form of plausible deniability.
Celebrity gossip sites and public forums like Reddit and Twitter allow mobs to form in an instant and lead to real-life harassment of famous people and ordinary folks alike.
And, most alarmingly of all, the widespread availability and use of AI-generated images, sound, and video have made it easier than ever to create convincing “evidence” to support a lie - or, conversely, to cast true events into doubt.
The 2020 podcast miniseries Rabbit Hole looks at some of the ways in which lies and conspiracy theories spread specifically through YouTube videos, fueled in part by machine learning-driven algorithms that care more about engagement than they do about facts, ethics, or civil society. As one young man explains, YouTube’s recommender algorithm - and its prioritization of exciting content over quality content - quickly led him from self-help videos, to alt-Right influencers, to blatant Nazi propaganda.
I was a freshman in university when I first encountered the term epistemology: the branch of philosophy concerning the origins and limits of knowledge. In other words - how do we know what we know?
Now, more than ever, we are facing a crisis of epistemology.
Many people I know, of all ages and political persuasions, have complained about how divided we are today as a society. Why can’t we all just get along again? they ask.
And I sympathize with them, I really do. But I don’t know how we can work together, or live together, if we can’t even agree on what is or isn’t reality.
The truth matters. It must. It is the foundation upon which our shared world is built, and if we allow it to erode, everything else will crumble.
When it comes to truth and lies, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
A weird piece of trivia about James Frey is that, alongside two co-authors, he wrote a forgettable YA sci-fi series under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore, the first of which, I Am Number Four (2010), was turned into an equally forgettable movie starring Alex Pettyfer a year later.
It is oddly difficult to find a full clip of this happening, leaving us to rely on contemporary media reports of the episode.
I didn’t realize until I was putting this essay together last night that the A Million Little Pieces scandal and this discussion of truthiness took place on almost the exact same timeline between October 2005 and January 2006. Something must have been in the water that year.
If Syllabus were ever to have merch, I think it would just be a t-shirt or sticker of the Wikipedia text that says [citation needed].
Wow! Everything you wrote resonates with me. Wish this piece had a wider audience. So timely and important.
The James Frey incident had a HUGE impact on me. I read that book before Oprah championed it, devoured it, absolutely loved it, taught it in an adult-ed English course where it had a big impact on a lot of the students. I was really shaken by the Smoking Gun revelations.
Later (I guess the following school year?) I wanted to talk about this whole thing, about memoir and the concept of truth and lies in writing, to one of my classes, and I wanted to show the Oprah/James Frey interview where she confronted him. You are right when you say it's "oddly difficult" to find a clip of this, and that's not just because it was nearly two decades ago -- it was almost impossible to find it online even at the time, and even in the early YouTube era when EVERYTHING seemed to be on YouTube somewhere, I couldn't find it. I think Oprah's people wanted it scrubbed from memory.
Honestly, all this time afterwards, I still feel weird about that book. Maybe part of it is the feeling of having been "taken in."
The "Pittacus Lore"/Number Four thing is interesting too ... after the debacle of the memoirs, Frey tried to rebrand as what he'd always wanted to be anyway - a writer of serious literary fiction a la Jonathan Franzen etc. (Apparently he originally wanted A Million Little Pieces to be a novel and it was Nan Talese who convinced him it should be marketed as a memoir? That's the story I recall hearing at the time). But his Big Literary Novel comeback, Bright Shiny Morning, was not a big hit (you can read my review here, if curious: https://compulsiveoverreader.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/bright-shiny-morning-by-james-frey/). His next idea was to hire a stable of young writers for crap pay to churn out YA bestsellers under his "Full Fathom Five" imprint ... which I think is where the Pittacus Lore books came from (https://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/).
Since then, things have been pretty quiet on the James Frey front. But in retrospect it really feels like the beginning of an era of questioning what qualifies as "true" ... a question that's only getting more difficult to answer.