Assignment 2

For this assignment, I am going to write about the conflict that James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, had in claiming that his book was a memoir.  When his book was first released, Frey claimed that everything in it was true, despite some changes made to protect the identity of some of the characters.  Three years after its release, it was uncovered that a few details about one occurence in the book were fabricated, and many fans, including Oprah Winfrey, became very upset with Frey for categorizing it as a true story.  Ultimately, Frey ended up changing the genre of his book to a memoir/fiction, and putting a statement in the beginning of the new copies claiming that part of the story is not true.  For my paper, I plan to analyze what constitutes a story as a memoir, and the different impact a story has on its audience when it is categorized as nonfiction rather than being categorized as fiction.