What Oprah Couldn't Guess: James Frey and Hospital Lies

If you’ve ever been in a therapy group, a mental hospital, or a rehabilitation environment, you doubtless had a hunch about the origin of James Frey’s lies immediately. I’ve been in all three places (not an addict myself, but around them), and for the benefit of those of you who have not had the benefit, I’m going to give you my personal hunch.

Let’s say you are a white man from a privileged background, and that you have a lot of psychological problems. Let’s further suppose that you have taken to self-medicating those problems; the self-medication has led to the typical complications and, now, landed you in a rehab clinic. You don’t fit the stereotype of someone whose addiction would land him where you are now. All around you are people who have problems that most people would judge to be much worse than yours: abusive parents, strained finances, perhaps even disabilities other than addiction. You feel deeply inadequate; you must be weak to have succumbed to addiction when the spurs to addiction were so few. And like all addicts, you are used to telling endless skeins of lies. The only way now to make yourself look like you belong among such peers is to invent stories about how outlandishly, heroically, unimpeachably messed up you are, and tell them with passion, and tell them whenever you start feeling even slightly weak and pointless.

And there’s another layer. In such circumstances, you may well suddenly feel more vulnerable than you ever have before, precisely because your surroundings are so painstakingly safe. There’s nothing available for self-medication, obviously; more than that, there is nothing you can do to get the adrenaline that may well have come with self-medication, and there is nothing you can do to absent yourself from your present situation other than, you know, getting better. All you can do is sit quietly in a circle with other people in your situation whose actions are similarly circumscribed. You’re supposed to look at yourself and see if there’s anything you still like there. You wonder whether you deserve the help you’re being offered. The thrill of a lie may be the last available bulwark against complete surrender to the environment — you can, if you want, take advantage of the chance to improve while holding a bit of yourself back.  

I’m guessing that’s what most of this was. He told stories on himself in the clinic, and he kept telling them, and he eventually came to believe that they told a kind of truth about the struggle he had experienced. And that may be true, and it may have been enough to sell a book as fiction. But the stories ain’t true, as has been thoroughly documented.

What’s sad about the whole mess is that what he says about recovery — those involved should quit making excuses, basically — is a good message to have out there, precisely because it’s so different from the prevailing message about how to recover, and there are probably a lot of people who have benefited from hearing it. Say the most traveled path to recovery helps 98 percent of addicts; that’s still a lot of people looking for a way out, and Frey probably helped more than a few of them. If his book helped a thousand people recover from their addiction, in a way another tome or style of counseling or medication could not have, it really has provided an incalculable service to the betterment of humanity. It’s just that millions of people got a hollow, grimy feeling from finding out something they thought was true was actually an invention, and that also subtracts from the general welfare. So there’s not much utilitarian percentage in the book, either.

We all have to tell ourselves stories to get through the day. My boss’s criticisms were totally unjustified, Jeff was ruder than I was, my inability to find a date comes from several complex, tough-to-resolve psychological problems and not an apparent unwillingness to ask women on dates. And I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I always told the 100 percent truth in group therapy, either. But I always got the hollow, grimy feeling after I lied, and Frey apparently didn’t; he was thus able to think about his lies for long enough to write a book about them, and then to cash some checks from the sales of that book.

Being able to imagine the effect of one’s actions on other people is part of the concept of a “conscience,” and so I am not advocating letting Frey off the moral hook. (I’m from the Midwest.) Still, I’m guessing that he’s not a born liar; circumstances kept giving him powerful incentives to lie, right up until he got browbeaten by Oprah. It’s something to remember the next time you’re extolling, explaining, or exonerating yourself.

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