"Fake But Accurate" Goes Mainstream

I never heard of James Frey or his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, before this flap about his "embellishment" of his life story. But yesterday's Talk of the Nation had an editor and an author on to discuss the story. Both guests panned Frey for betraying his readers' trust by, not to put too fine a point on it, lying. But most callers defended him. Well, it was a moving story. Well, it helped people see what addiction is all about. And so on. The guests politely tried pointing out that his story is not what addiction is all about, because it never happened. He made it up. That's great if you're writing a novel, but if you say "Hey this really happened to me" and it didn't, then that is a lie.

I thought this was especially interesting in light of neo-Neocon's recent post on lies. She says:

So the new definition of a lie has become: something that fooled me. Something that I heard and thought was true, and then discovered wasn't true. It made me angry to be jerked around like that. So it's a lie.

Such a listener lacks awareness of any need to ascertain the state of mind of the speaker in order to define an utterance as a lie--it is simply irrelevant; it does not compute in the equation. In fact, the so-called liar is actually often either mistaken, misinformed by others, in denial, or deluded. But that doesn't matter to a listener who hears everything only in terms of him/herself and how something makes him/her feel.

The Frey situation is the reverse. I liked the book, it was powerful, it helped me, I agree with it. Therefore it is not a lie. It could have happened. It's fake, but accurate