The Memoir That Was Sold as Truth and Refunded as Fiction

James Frey's A Million Little Pieces was published in April 2003 by Doubleday, a division of Random House, and sold as a memoir of addiction and recovery. Sales were modest until September 2005, when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. The book went on to sell more than five million copies. In January 2006 the website The Smoking Gun published the results of a six week investigation that questioned the book's account of Frey's criminal record and time in jail. On 26 January Frey returned to Winfrey's programme and admitted that he had fabricated key parts, and his editor, Nan Talese, admitted that she had not checked the book's accuracy.

The commercial question was whether readers who bought a memoir had been sold something else. In September 2006 Frey and Random House reached a tentative settlement offering refunds to readers who said they felt defrauded. Claimants had to supply proof of purchase, a page from the book and a sworn statement that they had bought it believing it to be a memoir. Critics said that so demanding a process would deter most buyers, and reports in 2007 suggested that only about 1,700 readers had applied.

The case exposed an uncomfortable point for publishers. A label such as memoir is a promise about the product, yet the checking of that promise had been left to the author.