James Frey, author of the highly successful book A Million Little Pieces, admitted to fabricating and embellishing events in his memoir after an article on The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) challenged the book. Doubleday Books, Frey’s publishing company and an offshoot of Random House, is halting all printing and distribution of A Million Little Pieces until notes from the author and the publisher are included in the text.

On Feb. 1, the author’s note was posted on the Random House Web site. “I embellished many details about my past experiences, and altered others in order to serve what I felt was the greater purpose of the book,” Frey admits. “I sincerely apologize to those readers who have been disappointed by my actions.”

The note explains several events mentioned in A Million Little Pieces that were altered. Frey said that he was not “in real-life directly involved” in the train accident that killed a girl from his school. He said that his jail time and criminal acts were embellished.

He also said that his account of his root canal without anesthesia was accurate and that he had the medical records to support it.

Also in the note, Frey said “I made other alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which portrayed me in ways that made me tougher and more daring and more aggressive that in reality I was, or am.”

“My mistake, and it is one I deeply regret, is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience,” Frey said on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Winfrey invited Frey to speak on her show and confronted him on-air. “It is difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped … but more importantly I feel that you betrayed millions of readers,” Winfrey said.

A Million Little Pieces shot up The New York Times Best-Seller List and gained massive popularity when Oprah Winfrey included it in her book club selection in September 2005.

Mary Karr, memoir author and one of Frey’s toughest critics, said that the author’s note was self-serving and evasive. “He keeps saying there’s a great debate about fact and fiction in memoirs, but the only debate is in his mind,” Karr said. “It’s not really that hard; you just don’t make stuff up.”

Even though, in previous interviews, Frey referred to A Million Little Pieces as a true story, he later said that the manuscript was offered to publishers as both a novel and as a memoir.

Frey’s former literary agent, Kassie Evashevski, said that there was a brief discussion of marketing the book as fiction out of respect for his family’s privacy.

Riverhead, the publishers of Frey’s sequel My Friend Leonard, is distancing itself from the author and reconsidering their contract. Riverhead is also investigating the authenticity of events in My Friend Leonard.

Riverhead has already uncovered that in the opening chapters of Leonard, when Frey recounts his jail time of 87 days, were not true. Frey also wrote that his girlfriend had committed suicide by hanging herself, but she had actually slit her wrists.

“I feel that in a memoir like Frey’s that claims to be a bout such a raw, real, and difficult subject matter, it is important for his readers to be able to trust him,” said sophomore Maria Walsh-Cole. “To find out Frey lied about important and significant details in the book is a betrayal to his fans.”

Simply said by Walsh-Cole, “Why lie?”

In the week of Jan. 20, Frey’s publishing companies ran an apology letter in USA Today. It explained that Doubleday & Anchor Books has a policy of standing by its authors. The letter goes on to say that Frey assured the publishers that everything in his memoir was accurate to his recollections.

The publisher’s letter makes it clear in the first paragraph that they no longer stand by Frey. “It is not the policy or stance of this company that it doesn’t matter whether a book sold as nonfiction is true. A nonfiction book should adhere to the facts as the author knows them.