The fights between patients at James Frey’s treatment center and the treatment of patients by administrators — exaggerated.

Frey’s three-month stay in prison — completely false.

Frey’s attack on a police officer — embellished.

Frey receiving two root canals without Novocaine — a lie.

James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, is a common name to even those who haven’t read the best-selling memoir that sky-rocketed him to the top of literary fame. After an article published by thesmokinggun.com, an investigative Web site, aspects of Frey’s memoir were questioned for their authenticity and truth.

He has been on television shows like Larry King Live defending his book since The Smoking Gun’s article published Jan. 8.

His television appearances culminated with an on-air admission of guilt Jan. 26 on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Frey found himself booed on the same stage where only a few months prior he was heralded as a frank and honest writer. Winfrey, who selected Frey’s memoir for her book club, defended him until that day.

Winfrey retracted her defense of Frey and questioned him to reveal to her, and the millions of readers who trusted him, what was true and what was not.

“I do not have the same respect for Frey and it is sad that he is not the person that he claimed to be,” Katie Peth, a sophomore in accounting, said. “It made me question a lot about the two books and his life.”

Peth, who only two days prior to the previous statement vehemently defended Frey, represents the conflict many readers, who drew so much from what they believed to be the author’s sharp and brutal honesty about addiction, are facing. Her attitude, like so many others, changed from a maternal/paternal understanding and forgiveness to disappointment.

“It will still be my favorite book,” Peth said. “But I will look at it with less credibility and respect.”

Jordan Lowy, a freshman in communication, said she enjoyed the book prior to hearing about the allegations raised against Frye by The Smoking Gun.

“When I learned about the exaggerations and outright lies that are told in the book, it completely discredited it for me,” Lowy said. “To find out that Frey’s ‘drug and alcohol abuse’ is basically comparable to many college students’ experimentation with them reduces A Million Little Pieces to simply being a poorly worded work of fiction.”

Others, like Annie Flowers, a junior in business management, stood by Frey prior to the revelations on The Oprah Winfrey Show and stand by him today.

“I don’t believe that many of the facts are fabricated,” Flowers said prior to Frey’s latest appearance on the program. “If they are, I’m sure that other drug addicts would agree they are not that far-fetched.”

And after Frey’s painful stuttered admission of fabrication and embellishment, Flowers continued to defend him.

“I found that Oprah’s show focused on all the wrong things,” Flowers said. “For example, the fact that Frey claimed Lilly essentially hung herself when in reality she slit her wrists is incredibly irrelevant to the actual reality of the memoir. The focus of that memory is not supposed to distinguish how she actually died by the fact that she did.”

While some are disappointed with this particular book, Frey’s admissions of embellishment and the creation of certain scenes in his book raises larger questions about what a creative memoirist, like Frey, owes to his readers.

“I think everyone knows there is a high percentage of fictionalizing, exaggeration and sweeping things under the rug in all memoirs — and that’s human nature,” Wilton Barnhardt, professor and director of the creative writing program, said. “I don’t think anyone reads a memoir thinking it’s going to be a photographic truth.”

Barnhardt, like Oprah Winfrey, did assert a memoir should still be truthful.

“The facts should be true,” Barnhardt said. “If you say you survived nine months in prison, you should have actually been there. If I was going to say I took unbelievable amounts of drugs and somehow was able to recover myself, that should be true.”

The meat and potatoes of Frey’s memoir, his battle with drug addiction and alcoholism at a treatment center in rural Minnesota, is what resounded so strongly with readers and is what divides them after the admission that what the author experienced was not the truth. Frey’s “battle” with his own personal demons gave countless people who have battled or are battling abuse hope.

“Part of the problem of that James Frey book is that people are drawing hope from his story,” Barnhardt said. “People are saying, ‘Well if he did all that and came back and saved himself then I can too.’ Surely some of the people who long for that kind of recovery are now thinking it’s hopeless.”

The hope given to those struggling with addiction by A Million Little Pieces is in contention amongst Frey’s supporters and detractors.

“He’s capitalizing off of people who looked to his work as a sign of hope,” Lowy said. “He’s essentially stolen money from people who are at a low point in their life and are looking to a role model. He’s no better than a tele-evangelist.”Katie Newell, an English alumna, disagrees with critics of Frye, like Lowy, who believes the message is lost with the embellishments and fabrications.

“The story is that of willpower and what it takes to overcome terrible drug and alcohol addictions,” Newell said. “I think the message of the story is more important than whether or not a certain incident really happened.”

Statements by supporters like Newell raise the question if A Million Little Pieces were packaged as a novel like Frye originally intended, would it have seen the success it had?

“He tried to sell the book as fiction to 17 different [publishing houses] and then decided to repackage it as a memoir and it sold,” Barnhardt said. “Now that says something. The story was only interesting in as much as it was true — if someone really survived it.”

Even though he originally intended to sell the book as a novel, Frye changed little of the book when selling it as a memoir and contended on Jan. 26 on The Oprah Winfrey Show that he “didn’t think it was a novel” and that he still “thinks it is a memoir.”

The wake created by the discrediting of Frey’s best-seller, the most successful of all books selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club, could potentially be felt not only with the future of Frey’s literary career after A Million Little Pieces and the sequel My Friend Leonard, but for all writers of the creative memoir.

“I think this was always conceived and marketed as a best-seller so the more publicity the better,” Barnhardt said. “There are literary memoirs out there that I wonder if they may not get published.”

New questions have been raised concerning the validity of other memoir writers like Augusten Burroughs and even Oprah Winfrey’s next book club selection, Elie Wiesel’s holocaust memoir Night.