Always Anna

Okay, okay, I get it. The guy lied. He totally, completely, unapologetically lied to everyone. And after finally reading the book, I’ve formed an opinion.

For the most part, I don’t care. Blah blah blah honesty blah blah blah misleading readers blah blah blah pants are on fire. I just don’t care. Because, even knowing it was, at best, half-truth, I still found the book ridiculously entertaining. And disturbing. He made some really good points about addiction in general, and I loved the insight about AA being another form of addiction (although it clearly works for a lot of people, which I respect). I liked his writing style, and the way he organized his story. I liked the lack of punctuation and capitalization. And I liked the content of the story.

There was only one thing that bothered me.

Frey brought up, time and time again, how important the truth is. How truth is the only thing that matters. I noticed it for the first time on page 95 of the “memoir”; the importance of the truth is stressed again on pages 107 & 108, 178, 180, and 201. And I’m sure I missed some. The quote that struck me the most was on page 178, where Frey wrote, “That this man is standing in front of me and everyone else in theis room lying to us is heresy. The truth is all that matters. This is is f*cking heresy.” And that is Frey’s problem. The truth is no longer what he wanted it to be – he is no longer just an addict that overcame his vice and wrote a kick*ss book. Now the truth is that he stretched the truth to tell a better story, all the while claiming that it was the truth. So, by his own logic, Frey’s entire book is heresy. We shouldn’t stand for it, right?

And that just comes back to what’s important to the individual reader. To me, Frey is a hypocrite, nothing more, nothing less. For me, it doesn’t matter that he stretched the truth to tell a better story – I like the story as is. I don’t need to like an author to like their work – if that were true there would be no classics left for me to read. Yes, future printings should have author’s and publisher’s notes as disclaimers. Maybe it shouldn’t be sold as a memoir. But the book is still really good. I’m not sorry I read it, and I’d recommend it to others.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Entertain Me!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.