Lying Truthfully

When Carrick was on the road, she read a book called Lying by Lauren Slater. Intrigued by the words on the cover of the Penguin paperback she brought home, I read it, too. In place of a subtitle, the words are: "There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write and that's a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark."

The actual subtitle of Lying, we learn on the inside title page, is "A Metaphorical Memoir."

The first chapter of the book, in its entirely, is "I exaggerate."

Slater tells us that she suffers from epilepsy, although epilepsy may be a metaphor. Towards the end of the book, she draws a parallel between addiction and the epileptic seizures — which bring ecstasy and energy as well as terror — that have shaped her life from girlhood through her college years. (Or haven't, I suppose.)

It just so happens that Slater has unwittingly stumbled into an AA meeting. She continues to go to it for some time, even through she doesn't have a chemical dependency. One day when she's feeling depressed, her sponsor (she's gone through all the motions of joining the group) gives her the lowdown on the concept of "acting as if."

"Act as if you are feeling good, and productive, and eventually, it will become that way. In the program we call it 'Acting as If...'"

Slater mulls this concept a bit, finding it partly right, partly wrong. Then she writes:

"Act as if. As if."

"In this way, fictions become facts."

Slater also ruminates about the fifth step, which she says a lot of AAers consider the most critical.

"That was the step where you got absolutely honest, where you told another person about all the wrongs and deceits and manipulations.... AAers like to say, 'You are only as sick as your secrets,' and how well I understood that."

Slater really couldn't do a fifth step in the program, she says, because part of it would have to be the admission that she was not an alcoholic. But she allows that the memoir we're reading is, in a way, a fifth step of its own.

In the Afterword, Slater writes:

Slater succeeded in lying truthfully. I wasn't always sure where she was coming from, but I always knew how we got to where we'd arrived.

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Slater also wrote Welcome to My Country, Prozac Diary, and Opening Skinner's Box, a quirky look at some of the most controversial psychological experiments of the Twentieth Century. It was assailed by academics and some of the people she interviewed for twisting reality and making up quotes. Slater admitted to "ten minor" factual errors, according to the New York Times, said there was no "willful deceit," and promised to correct them in subsequent editions.

I'll pass. I think I got the message the first time around.

Oprah's Frey Fray

I'd never seen Oprah in action for more than a few minutes, but I could see why she is so revered and influential as she jumped back into the Frey fray today. She reeked of both sincerity and anguish, and her reasons for wanting to believing James Frey in the first place, defending him on Larry King a few weeks ago, and now admitting that she was wrong, were very human.

James Frey reminded me of me when I was an 11-year-old boy who had just been turned over to the parish priest for stealing candy at the supermarket. What can you say, really, except that you didn't mean to do it. That is to say that the essential truth was that I was not a bad person at heart even though I was, undoubtedly, a thief. The worst part about the affair was that I had given the supermarket manager a false name — somebody I barely knew. That made me a liar and coward for not owning up to my mistake. The priest took me over his knee and gave me a spanking, kind of like what Oprah did to Frey.

I survived, and eventually realized that what I did was wrong even if it wasn't the crime of the century.

I hope Frey does. I hope he doesn't slide into drug use, or worse. I truly hope he's able to take this experience and move forward in his recovery. If I were him, I'd sell my loft and house in the Hamptons, pull out of the movie deal, move to a down-home town in the middle of nowhere, and take a job that would help me see beyond myself.

Nan Talese, the Doubleday publisher who nominally took responsibility for the book, didn't really. She made excuses. I found her to be the more irksome character on the show today.

Bertelsmann Media Worldwide, the corporate parent of Doubleday, should take the millions of dollars of profits it has banked — and will — from A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard and establish a trust fund for addicts who can't afford to pay for rehab.

The person who made the most sense about the importance of truth was Roy Peter Clark, who spoke for a few minutes toward the end of Oprah's show. I admired a series called Fifty Writing Tools that Clark wrote on Poyteronline a couple of years ago. Anyone who is interested in techniques for writing nonfiction "creatively" should read it. In reviewing Clark's work tonight, I could not find any discussion about the importance of not making things up. Of course not. In the old school tradition that Clark represents, it's so obvious a requirement that it need not be addressed.

And now I think I'll return to reality and put Frey behind me.

Oprah Today

I gather that Oprah is taped in the morning in Chicago but airs in most markets in the afternoon, as it does in New York (4 p.m., ABC). You might want to watch today's show. Here's the lede of a New York Times' story:

Frey is on the show. Click here for more.

Carrick's Update

Sam Go, the superb MSNBC.com producer who put together the package of stories on the Dateline NBC site in July, called last week and asked for an update on Carrick since so many people have asked how she's doing. Who better to write it than Carrick? Her update was posted there this afternoon.

Disease & Will Power

I came across an article in my notes that better explains my thinking regarding the disease aspect of addiction and the need to take responsibility for recovery. Here's the full article, by Dr. Alan I. Leshner, former director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. Here's a relevant paragraph:

For those interested in the genetic piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is addiction, a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that "many of the genes involved in smoking are in the same chromosomal region, or loci, as genes related to drinking behavior."

A Million Little Lies?

The Smoking Gun website yesterday tore apart many of the factual details of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, and media — large and small — have jumped on the story. I went to Frey's website to see if he had answered the charges. His last post (as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday) was in response to an email from The Smoking Gun the day before its piece was published. He wrote, "So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response. "

I am an avid reader of addiction memoirs. I'm in the middle of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and can't wait to finish this blog entry so I can dive into Part Three. I'm hoping to excerpt a chapter that I think paints as exquisite a portrait of an addict's megalomania as I've ever read.

When A Million Little Pieces came out a few years ago, however, I decided to skip it after reading a few reviews that suggested that some of the scenes, starting with an airplane trip where the author seemed like he should be in an emergency room instead of an airline seat, were implausible. When the book got Oprah's imprimatur, and suddenly everyone else was reading it, and book agents and the like began touting it as a model to be emulated, I broke down and ordered it.

It was slower slogging for me than I anticipated. I found the protagonist to be pretty damn dull, despite some memorable scenes — such as his having root canal without anesthesia — in the first 200 pages. (But I did wonder why he wasn't allowed to use anesthesia, and so did my dental hygienist. There may be some Novocain addicts out there, but we've yet to meet one.)

There were some other details that bothered me later, such as an improbable list of juvenile transgressions that went far beyond anything I'd ever heard anyone do with such persistency and vigor (and I'd done a few myself), and the pummeling of a priest in Paris who too conveniently attempts to seduce a young Frey contemplating suicide (and I've known pederast clergy).

Mind you, these are none of the details that The Smoking Gun, in a piece titled "A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey's Fiction Addiction," contradicts. I won't bother recounting those here.

I found myself engrossed in the story once Frey became a three-dimensional character, capable of both love and friendship, in the second half of the book. All of a sudden, I cared about him. The story took on a dramatic arc. I bit my nails over whether he'd get caught in his trysts with his girlfriend, and wondered what would happen to the judge he befriends. I was fascinated by his overnight perspicacity. Most of all, I was captivated by the larger-than-life Mafioso, Leonard, who decides he'll be Frey's guardian angel whether he likes it or not.

If these characters turn out to be as fictional as Frey's trumped-up criminal record appears to be, I'll be disappointed. But the biggest fraud Frey could commit, in my book, is being dishonest about his own character. Did he trump up his John Wayne, I-did-it-my-way, take-your-12-steps-and-shove-them persona just to create a more distinctive literary protagonist?

I sent the following email to someone last week who had asked for my opinion of the book about a month earlier, when I had just started to read it.

Frey's message, loud and clear, is that addiction is not a disease. That's hogwash.

It appears that people have been inspired by Frey's message. That's good. I, too, believe that it is possible to achieve recovery outside of a 12-Step program, if for no other reason than I did myself. But I also believe that 12- Step programs have proven themselves as the single-most effective way to recover and it serves no purpose, in my mind, to put them down as vehemently as he does.

It's not that addicts can't be extremely insightful, even in the grip of their addiction. I think we've witness that here with Steve, who left this morning to begin a 90-day rehab. Even when Steve was using, he wrote with a keen understanding about what he was doing and what he needed to do to stop.

Among Steve's first posts to the site last August 30 (post #7) was this:

Or this insight into the company he kept (post #70) in November:

Or this recent explanation of his New Year's resolutions (post #2).

Frankly, the only time I worried about Steve eventually getting clean was when he said that he'd been given a book about Rational Recovery and A Million Little Pieces for Christmas and, after reading it straight through, was troubled. I have nothing against Rational Recovery, if it works for you, but I didn't want to see Steve give up his bed at the rehab — a placement that he'd fought hard to get. Here's my reply to Steve:

Steve sent me the postal address of his rehab this morning, and I will forward it to anyone who has participated in our Discussions if you'd like to write to him. He also wrote:

I believe Steve is being honest with us. I have learned a lot from him, and I know his voice will be missed by many people while he's away. I regret that Frey, apparently, is not being honest with us. But the messengers are irrelevant in the long run. The truth is, the only final word on addiction is in the last breath of someone caught in its grips.

Youth & Alcohol Ads II

Predictably, the American Association of Advertising Agencies responded to the release of a study that shows that alcohol advertising is effective by claiming that it's not effective at all — at least as far as young adults are involved.

“We’ve seen over the last several decades that as alcohol-advertising spending increased, underage drinking substantially decreased," the AAAA's executive vice president and director of government relations told Ad Age [registration required]. "The raw facts of the marketplace contradict the main finding of the report.”

If that sounds convoluted, it's only because it is. For one thing, in today's fragmented media marketplace, it costs far more to reach the target audience (particularly the elusive male and youth market) than it did in the past. Alcohol marketers, like all addicts, have to progressively buy more stuff to get the same buzz .

Secondly, I don't know how far back the AAAA is going in stating that "underage drinking substantially decreased," but SAMSHA says its figures for 2004 were essentially the same as those for 2003 and 2002. Those figures are pretty alarming:

Both sides can make stats dance on the head of a pin all day long. Crime figures are way down nationally. Most crimes are committed by people who abuse alcohol and other drugs. (BTW, a new study out of Sweden determined that 58 percent of 133 violent offenders drank shortly before their violent incidents.) Should the alcohol industry be congratulated for somehow having a hand in the reduced crime rate? Perhaps those little teasers about "drinking responsibly" are having an impact? Oops. No. How can that be, if advertising doesn't influence consumption, only the choice of brand?

If ads don't make kids want to drink, why don't marketers create boring ads that talk about things that old folks relate to, like legacy and quality?

A study from the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) showed 66 beer ads to 253 children and found that 35 percent said ads for Budweiser that feature a talking ferret made them want to buy the beer. Only 5 percent wanted to buy beer after viewing an Anheuser-Busch ad focused on the company's "Legacy of Quality."

The Ad Age piece also refers to a spokesperson from Miller Brewing Co. who "noted that that the vast majority of youth in Roper Youth Reports cite their parents as having the most influence over whether they drink."

In response, I can't say it any better than Jeanne Kilbourne did.

Full disclosure: In the Nineties, I did a lot of writing for the AAAA's now-defunct magazine, Agency, and launched and wrote BackChannel, a newsletter about interactive advertising for its members. The AAAA's officers and staff, and most of the members, were not only highly intelligent but also honorable professionals. I never understood, though, the AAAA's positioning on alcohol and tobacco. I certainly understand an advertising trade organization's imperative to defend the right to advertise a legal product. What I don't understand is why it does so with an argument that not only undercuts the bigger message — advertising works — but also flies in the face of common sense.

Youth and Alcohol Ads

A new study on the effects of alcohol advertising on individuals aged 15 to 26 found that the more ads young people see, the more they drink. On average, each additional ad increases the number of drinks consumed by one percent.

This is no surprise to anyone with a semblance of common sense, but the alcohol and tobacco industry has long maintained that advertising does not stimulate or increase consumption, it only encourages consumers to switch brands.

There are compelling arguments to lower the drinking age to 18, but this study further confirms why I think it's a bad idea:

"Drinkers younger than 21 years, who consume approximately 20% of all alcoholic drinks, imbibe more heavily than adults per drinking episode and are involved in twice as many fatal car crashes while drinking. The problem is getting worse, with youth initiating drinking at an earlier age on average than they did in the past."

The study is published in the January 2006 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.