Mixing Memoir and Desire: James Frey, Wound Culture, and the “Essential American Soul”

Abstract

I made other alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which pictured me in ways that made me tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am. People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal. I think one way people cope is by developing skewed perception of themselves that allows them to overcome and do things they thought they couldn't do before. My mistake, and it is one I deeply regret, is writing about person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not person who went through experience. -James Frey's a note to reader, A Million Little Pieces imagined person we encounter in Frey's blockbuster memoir, A Million Little Pieces (AMLP) (2003), proved alluring not just to author and supposed addict himself, but to an American public deeply interested in stories of recovery, personal transformation, and heroic self-reliance. James of AMLP-troubled, swaggering, prone to intimate with death, in hot pursuit of radically autonomous selfhood-is close kin to prominent type in national literary canon, as well as familiar protagonist in what Mark Seltzer calls contemporary wound culture, where versions of that type and their relationship to and opened private bodies and torn and opened psyches (Seltzer 109) command extraordinary attention. popularity of James, up until public debunking of his authenticity, had much to do with his status as contemporary permutation (if rather bathetic one) of D. H. Lawrence's essential American soul, mythical New World man who is hard, isolate, stoic, and killer (Lawrence 68). Fantasies of regeneration through violence, as Richard Slotkin has so compellingly demonstrated in his studies of frontier mythology, still linger long after closing of geographic frontiers (Slotkin, Regeneration; Gunfighter). Commenting from across Atlantic on the brash explicitness of American capitalism, Terry Eagleton puts point bluntly: The pioneer spirit [of nation] was displaced rather than dissolved. epic rapacity which subdued land in first place carried on as regular business. Probably no other people on earth use word 'aggressive' in such positive fashion, and no group outside psychoanalytic circles is so fond of word 'dream' (Eagleton 66). We find in AMLP an evocation-profound, timely, and disturbing-of enduring magic of these words in popular imagination. Teasing out literary and cultural affinities of Frey's imagined person or personified coping strategy helps us understand better, I suggest, abiding attraction of radical autonomy as personal ideal, along with inevitable implication of violent action in such autonomy. Frey's non-fiction book explores young addict's time at rehabilitation clinic, and it presents to us pop-cultural protagonist we know well: injured soul who overcomes daunting challenges, manages to heal, grow strong, and flourish, and who brings his pain and redemption to public as abject confession and spiritual guide. initial success of AMLP depended heavily on its claims to gritty realism in its public probing of private wounds, its supposed honesty in relaying harrowing details of personal redemption, and of course also its visual legitimization in form of photogenic and brash young author himself, alive to tell tale, who claimed in early interviews that he wanted to be the f-ing best writer of his generation (qtd. in Valby 64).1 This was story, above all, about success in self-creation. When Frey's claims to have written true story were revealed as largely fraudulent by journalists at thesmokinggun.com and by Oprah Winfrey, former patron, his authority as an honest evangelist was sabotaged.2 That book strains credulity (or should) on nearly every page-from its preternaturally stoic and arrogant narrator, to its preposterously stereotyped supporting cast, to its relentlessly maudlin plot twists-is curious and rather overlooked element of this saga. …