A million little pieces
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Oprah Winfrey confronts author James Frey over lying
On January 26, 2006, during a live broadcast of her daytime TV talk show, Oprah Winfreyconfronts author James Frey about fabrications in A Million Little Pieces, his memoir about addiction and recovery, which she chose as an Oprah’s Book Club selection in September 2005.
“A Million Little Pieces,” published in 2003, was James Frey’s first book. In it, he describes in graphic detail his harrowing experiences with addictions to drugs and alcohol, and his time at a treatment center when he was in his early 20s. After Winfrey picked A Million Little Pieces for her popular on-air book club, which launched in 1996, the memoir climbed the best-sellers lists, following in the footsteps of many of the club’s previous selections. In October 2005, Frey appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to promote his book, which the talk show host had previously said she “couldn’t put down,” calling it “a gut-wrenching memoir that is raw and it’s so real…”
Then, in early January 2006, The Smoking Gun Web site published an expose claiming court
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Fake memoir
Type of literary forgery
"Fake journal" redirects here. For academic periodicals of dubious reputation, see Predatory journal.
Fake memoirs form a category of literary forgery in which a wholly or partially fabricated autobiography, memoir or journal of an individual is presented as fact. In some cases, the purported author of the work is also a fabrication.
In recent years,[when?] there have been a number of such memoirs published by major publishers, some that were well received critically and became best-sellers, that have subsequently proven to have been partially or completely fabricated. A number of recent fake memoirs fall into the category of "misery lit", where the authors claim to have overcome overwhelming losses (i.e. bereavement, abuse, addiction, and poverty). Several more have detailed fabricated stories of Holocaust survival, with at least one having been penned by an actual Holocaust victim.
As a result of recent best-selling memoirs having been outed for falsification, there have been calls for stronger vetting and fact checking
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5 Memoirs That Were Too Good to Be True
In 1997, a Belgian Jewish woman named Misha Defonseca published a gripping Holocaust memoir. When Defonseca was a young girl, her parents were arrested and deported by the Nazis. Alone and distraught, she set out on a grueling 1,900-mile (3,058-kilometer) trek across Europe to find her parents. According to Defonseca, she was accompanied and protected by a pack of friendly wolves.
Ironically, it was Defonseca's publisher that first began to question the claims of the star author. Together with a genealogist, the publisher dug into Defonseca's childhood in Brussels and discovered that Defonseca's real name was Monique De Wael. She was Catholic, not Jewish, and spent the war enrolled in school, not walking across Europe.
Not that Defonseca didn't endure her share of wartime trauma. Her parents, who were members of the Belgian underground resistance, were indeed carted away by the Nazis and killed. Under interrogation, Defonseca's father reportedly gave up the names of other resistance members, and young Defonseca was bullied and ostracized
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