Oprah Backs Redemptive Message Of Frey's Controversial Memoir

Doubleday earlier had issued a statement in which it stood by Frey, noting that the memoir form is "highly personal" and that "accusations against him notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers." The book has been on the New York Times paperback bestseller list since Winfrey made it her pick.

Publishing executives were reluctant to speak on the record about the Frey affair. But one high-ranking editor, who did not wish to be quoted because she had not read the report by the Smoking Gun, pointed out that if the allegations were true, they were different in kind from complaints often made about the subjectivity of memoirs.

"How you describe your mother is subject to interpretation," she said, but the content of legal records and police reports is not. It is a mistake, she added, to argue that this kind of fabrication -- if it occurred -- does not matter.

Frey told the New York Times in an interview last month that he had "originally envisioned 'A Million Little Pieces' not as a memoir but as a novel," and he confirmed on King's show that he had originally shopped it as fiction. The Smoking Gun quoted him as saying he had embellished parts of his story for "obvious dramatic reasons," and he did not deny this.

A Doubleday spokesman declined yesterday to comment further except to say: "We contracted with Mr. Frey for a work of nonfiction."

Frey told The Washington Post last fall, after "A Million Little Pieces" was chosen for Oprah's Book Club, that the experience of reliving his addiction and recovery had been so intense that he had never gone back to read his own book all the way through.

"I still have never read it," he said. If he did, he would find this line on page 107 of the paperback edition:

"There is truth, and that is all that matters. The truth."