James Frey, The Da Vinci Code What is Fact, What is Fiction?
There are at present several interesting debates going on in the literary world over “fact” and “fiction”. Most of you have heard the uproar over James Frey fabricating a great deal of his “autobiography” titled A Million Little Pieces. It wasn’t even a case of faulty memory, or others disagreeing with his interpretation of events that’s not that uncommon in life stories. After all, an autobiography is defined as the story of a person’s life written by that person and is open to the interpretation of events by said person. Mr Frey’s transgressions do not fall in that category. He simply made up large portions of his ‘life story’ to make his book more exciting or possibly to get a better movie deal. That’s where he crosses the line. “A literary work based on imagination and not necessarily on fact” is the definition of fiction. There’s a reason we have these designations. It’s so we know how to process the information we are taking in.
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