Writer (and prolific Harry’s Place commenter) SeanT, aka Toffee Womble, is also displeased with the lack of fact-checking in contemporary publishing that led to the success of the largely made-up James Frey memoir A Million Little Pieces:
The second reason I am personally pissed off with James ‘I spent eight minutes in prison’ Frey is that I have/had a second memoir in the pipeline. This memoir was going to detail all the bad stuff in my life. The really bad stuff. The heroin addiction, the crack habit. Because I have had a life as crazy if not much crazier than the life detailed in Frey’s bestseller. The difference between my life and Frey’s ‘life’, however, is that mine is fucking TRUE. I really did do two months in prison – and not for defacing library books – I was on a fucking RAPE CHARGE. I really WAS kidnapped by Hezbollah. I really DID get in a knife fight in Marseilles. I really DID live in a hotel in Bangkok that sold heroin on room service. I really WAS stranded in a forest in Siberia coming off heroin after being ejected from a troop train.
But who, exactly, after Frey, is ever going to believe me?
Assuming Sean’s ‘Blog photo represents some kind of default facial expression, imagine how he looked when he was TYPING ALL THOSE BITS IN CAPITALS.
He went out with a friend of mine and behaved like a knob towards her so I am not kindly disposed to him. But if one version of a life is a feat of the imagination and the other simply a poor-me reporting of events, I think I’d take the former.
Now the irony here, Morgs, is that the last time your personal testimony appeared in the comments at PooterGeek I had that Zadie Smith’s husband in my Inbox complaining about libel and had to delete a whole thread…
That Zadie Smith’s husband used to be a litigator but I reckon I could have him no problem…
mr geek
that link no longer works (unfortunately).
SeanT is one of my secret pleasures at HP – rather a dozen of his posts to one of benjis.