Truth Ache

As you may have heard, Oprah recently laid a public beatdown on James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces. It turns out the Oprah’s Book Club author took a few liberties with the truth in his “memoirs” of drug addiction. Did he really get a root canal with no anesthesia? Did he in fact go to jail? How much crack would a woodchuck smoke if a woodchuck could smoke crack? It’s all academic at this point, because Frey’s sold more than 3 million books, and last I heard he wasn’t giving any refunds.

In light of this whole Frey debacle, I feel it’s time for me to come clean on my own forthcoming addict-lit autobiography, tentatively titled A Billion Tiny Fragments. If Oprah would like to chastise me, she should know that I’ve been very dishonest and I deserve to be punched in the testicles on her show (it would be nice if she’d mention my book a couple of times, too). If anything, I think this whole ugly situation just reinforces my point that I’m a Bad Boy and a Pretentious Writer who’s prone to capitalizing Random Words, as if I were someone writing a Pamphlet arguing for Rebellion against the Tyrannical Monarchy in the Year 1774. Anyway, in the name of setting the record straight, here are the sections where, in retrospect, I may have exaggerated my story:

My mother was not abducted by the Taliban and forced to live in a cave in Tora Bora and crochet burqas. Actually, she went on a cruise to Bora Bora. And it was very pleasant.

On one point I will not budge: The chapter where I smoked rat poison and crashed my car into the Mass General maternity wing is definitely based on real-life events. I actually had two glasses of Chardonnay and went to a Livingston Taylor concert.

In Chapter 8, “Selling My Organs in Tijuana,” I wrote that I once smoked so much crack that my body was 50 percent crack, and the other junkies would eat my fingernails and overdose. Actually, I had a crack in my driveway, so I bought some Thompson’s Water Seal. I’m hoping that’ll take care of it.

About the story where I was crawling down I-95 huffing the freshly painted lane stripes and got hit by an 18-wheeler and died… I did eat some glue as a child.

Experts have said that the chapter of the book detailing my medical experiences couldn’t have happened, because it would be impossible for one man to use a rib-spreader on himself and then perform his own open-heart surgery after the doctor dies of an incredibly ironic heart attack at the beginning of the procedure. I wish I could say what

really happened, but after the procedure I was so jonesing for a cigarette that I smoked all the hospital documents pertaining to my operation. And my memory of the operation itself is fuzzy. Was it heart surgery or an ingrown toenail? I’ll let the haters split hairs.

Addiction experts have questioned the following passage, claiming that it’s impossible to become physically addicted to clothing:

“My personality is so addictive that everything is a potential addiction for me. I can’t even wear socks anymore, because I started to get addicted to socks and wear them in totally inappropriate situations, such as with sandals and while water-skiing. Then my family was like: ‘Ez, you need to admit to yourself that socks rule your life. Stop the lies.’ Now I get blisters and my feet are often cold, but I know it has to be this way.”

You know, that’s inaccurate. Now that I think about it, I’m addicted to sex, not socks. You can see how that would get confusing, particularly if you like to have sex with socks. Not that I do that, unless you find it dark and perverted and titillating, in which case: Yes, day and night, tube socks, ankle socks and sock monkeys.

Now, about the part where I injected diesel fuel into my femoral artery and then blacked out and went rock-climbing and had a boulder trap my arm so I had to cut it off to escape: The haters have pointed out that my two fully functional arms prove this is a lie. I say, Back off. Were you there? Were you? No. So who’s to say what actually happened? There are two people who know what really happened that day, and one of them is a grizzly bear. And he’s not talking, because I killed him with my bare hands—I mean, hand.