Nonfiction Authors Feeling the Frey Fallout

Posted on March 3, 2006

Carol Memmet at USA Today investigates the effect that the James Frey disaster is having on nonfiction writers. Memoirists are having to answer lots of questions from their publishers about the facts in their biographies: one author hired a private detective to get all the names and dates straight.

Janice Erlbaum, whose memoir of her life as a homeless teen, Girlbomb, has just been published by Villard, says she had "an extensive legal review with the Random House legal department, but I don't think they followed up." "They asked me a lot of questions like, 'What were the dates that this happened?' They really wanted to know who was who. I don't think they did any independent verification, but they certainly did ask me about every person and every detail in the book."

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Cupcake Brown, whose A Piece of Cake, a memoir of substance abuse and gangbanging, is also new to stores, hired a private investigator to help get facts right. "I wanted to be as honest and truthful as possible and have as much factual background and backup and evidence as possible — way before Frey. Every memoirist should do that."

Jenny Frost, president of Crown, Brown's publisher, says Crown didn't fact-check Brown but says of life after Frey: "I would like to think that we've always been intelligent about our authors and good judges of character. Certainly, in Cupcake's case, that's how we feel." But, she adds, "we'll never be quite as innocent as we were before."

Nonfiction writers should now be prepared to defend the facts in their books before they submit manuscripts to publishers. But we have to say that if you need to hire a private investigator to find out what happened to you in the last 20 years, maybe writing a memoir is not such a good idea.

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