A couple of people have asked me what I think "as a writer" of James Frey and his non-memoir. As a writer I think the same thing I think as a person: he's a crook.

If Frey really finds it that hard to tell the difference between stuff that happened and stuff he made up, he's insane, we all should feel sorry for him, and he should be committed. But he doesn't, because when he first wrote AMLP he was shopping it as a novel. It's fairly poorly written, so it kept getting rejected. Then either Frey or his agent got the bright idea to change its category -- fiction to memoir, gee, not a big deal, right? Only the difference between artifice and reality. And the nice thing is, in memoir the quality of the writing is less important because you're delivering not Art, but Heartfelt Truth.

So Doubleday bought it. Do they bear some blame? No; book publishers don't have a tradition of fact-checking except on claims writers make that the publisher could get sued over. (Though I wonder where the copyeditor was. I had one once who called Schoharie County to make sure its parking meters took dimes the way I said they did. If she'd been on this book, she'd have called the jail to make sure Frey had gotten the dates of his incarceration exactly correct, and the whole thing would have unraveled.) No, Nan Talese and Doubleday look a little dopey, as does Oprah, but I think it's kind of sweet how gullible everyone was. Frey, on the other hand, is a lying-ass swindler. I don't see any moral ambiguity here.