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well i just finished reading this book and i think it's one of the best books i have read in the last fives years. i thought it was creative and raw and original and powerful.
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Oh I agree!... still an amazing read, and I particularly agree with you about the "creative" part. If anything, in light of what TSG has uncovered, it's even more creative than I thought.
There's a couple of reasons I thought this report was worth sharing, as opposed to "whining".
One is that it's flat out fascinating: If you read the report and watch them dismantle, with research and proof, pretty much every part of the book that is researchable and proveable, it starts to become fairly obvious that you can't trust a word of what Frey says in A Million Little Pieces. Leaving aside, for a moment, whether or not that should affect your enjoyment of the book, I found the sheer capacity of Frey for exaggeration to be a story in itself! As The Smoking Gun puts it, regarding Frey's supposed incident where he hits a cop with his car and then proceeds to raise hell while being swarmed Grand Theft Auto style,:
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To review:
There was no patrolman struck with a car.
There was no urgent call for backup.
There was no rebuffed request to exit the car.
There was no "You want me out, then get me out."
There was no "fucking Pigs" taunt.
There were no swings at cops.
There was no billy club beatdown.
There was no kicking and screaming.
There was no mayhem.
There was no attempted riot inciting.
There were no 30 witnesses.
There was no .29 blood alcohol test.
There was no crack.
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"Creative" doesn't begin to describe an effort like that!
The other reason I felt like throwing up this link is that, if I'm being honest, yeah it does bother me a bit that an author gave us a collection of supposedly factual, ultra personal "memoirs" and, at the very least, large swaths of them turn out to be nonsense. I guess the instance where this is probably the most reprehensible would be when he appropriates what was a real event, namely the death of a teen girl in a train accident, and inserts himself in it as being almost as much a victim as she was, because supposedly the whole town turned on him afterwards and blamed him for the accident. In real life, or "IRL" as they say in the intraweb, no-one could really recall much about him... there's a certain kind of appropriation going on here which I find pretty crass. To my mind, a lot of the book has to do with sympathizing, if not empathizing, with Frey and his struggles, and that part of the appeal (however large or small a fraction it might be) is pretty much lost to me.
Like I said before, even during my initial read through of A Million Little Pieces I had a feeling that some of it was fiction... just not quite this much. I think the report is worth reading (and entirely credible, btw) and that's why I put it out there... feel free to turn a blind eye if you want.