A million little lawsuits
About a week ago, a federal judge approved a settlement in the class-action lawsuit against author James Frey . He wrote "A Million Little Pieces ," a gritty, tear-jerking account of his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction, portions of which were untrue.
Upon learning of the fabrications, irate schoolmarm Oprah Winfrey subjected Frey to a nationally televised scolding last year. Oprah had hyped "Pieces," just as she had hyped Pontiacs, to her devoted flock. Frey had "betrayed millions of readers," she said, so he had to pay.
Now he and his publisher Random House will have to pay again. Next month Random will place ads in Sunday supplements like Parade magazine and set up a website offering "Pieces" buyers a refund. That is the key part of the $2.35 million settlement in which a purported class of aggrieved readers, and Random, agreed to stop suing each other over the alleged consumer fraud perpetrated by Frey's book.
What a joke. Random says it settled to avoid costly litigation. It seems obvious that the defendants settled (1) to put the orgy of bad publicity behind them and (2) to avoid creating some "bad law" that could wreak serious harm on the publishing industry.
Think about what lies f arther down this road. Rodale , for instance, has been publishing the phenomenally successful " The South Beach Diet " for four years. Right on the book's cover, they call it a "foolproof plan for fast and healthy weight loss ." That proposition sounds arguable, even actionable, at the very least. Or perhaps the harpies of the plaintiff's bar could take a pass at the coffers of the Thomas Nelson Bible companies, which tout their product as "the greatest book ever written. In it God Himself speaks to humankind ."
Maybe, maybe not. Suppose I read their Bible, and God, contrary to their assertion, fails to speak to me? One of the plaintiffs in the Frey case sued for "lost time" spent reading his book. If God is busy worrying about Darfur or Lebanon, I would be wasting my time waiting for her to pipe up.
Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman ridiculed the Frey litigants' "lost time" claim on his website. "Since a court can't manufacture time, the readers want the next best substitute -- cash," Goldman wrote. "Should time-wasting become a proper basis for damages, I plan to nail the IRS first and the airlines second."
The implications for newspaper columnists are chilling.
L'affaire Frey epitomizes the new, all-consuming prissiness about reading and literature. Consumerism is the order of the day in belles lettres. Last month, a writer named Alex Heard gobbled up vast amounts of real estate in the New Republic magazine to tell us that -- wait for it -- not everything that David Sedaris writes is true.
Well, flog me with a wet noodle, as Ann Landers used to say. Sedaris, like Garrison Keillor , comes out of radio storytelling. (Heard's rant was titled, "This American Lie ," a dig at the well-know radio show "This American Life," where Sedaris did some of his early work.) They have an enviable gift, just as Mark Twain did, for confecting sometimes funny, sometimes poignant tales from the stuff of life.
So Heard, who exposes some not terribly compelling discrepancies between fact and fiction in Sedaris's stories, has set the table for would-be litigants. It could be quite a meal. You have a moneybags publisher, Little, Brown ; a kazillion-selling author, and a fiction/non fiction elision labeled "true." It's consumer fraud! Ka-ching! I look forward to hosting the forthcoming legal reality show, "Win Some of David Sedaris's Money."
In his essay, "Memoirs of a Drudge ," James Thurber -- a very accomplished journalist/storyteller, to put it mildly -- told of his halcyon days at an English-language newspaper in the south of France. "It was then our custom to sit around for half an hour, making up items for the society editor's column," he remembered. "In this manner we turned out, in no time at all . . . the most glittering column of social notes in the history of the American newspaper, either here or abroad."
And I thought all those society items were true! I'll be calling my lawyers in the morning.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 