NEW YORK - Random House will offer a refund to readers who bought James Frey’s drug and alcohol memoir “A Million Little Pieces” directly from the publisher, a move believed to be unprecedented, after the author was accused of exaggerating his story.
Readers calling Random House’s customer service line to complain Wednesday were told that if the book was bought directly from the publisher it could be returned for a full refund. Those who bought the book at a bookstore were told to try and return it to the store where it was bought.
“If the book was bought directly from us we will refund the purchase price in full,” one Random House customer service told Reuters, adding that readers would have to return the book with the original invoice. “If you bought it at a book store, we ask that you return the book to the book store.”
Asked why the publisher, which normally sells books directly to consumers as non-refundable, would offer refunds, the agent said, “because of the controversy surrounding it.”
Several other Random House customer service agents called by Reuters reporters also agreed to pay refunds.
Frey’s memoir of alcohol and drug-induced mayhem sold 1.77 million copies last year after being chosen by Oprah Winfrey’s book club in September. But investigative Web site The Smoking Gun Sunday reported the book, published by Random House’s Doubleday division, was full of exaggeration and inaccuracies.
Frey gets defensive Frey, who will appear on “Larry King Live” to discuss the controversy for the first time, has called the accusations “the latest attempt to discredit me.”
“I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bulls--t with any sort of further response,” Frey wrote this week on his personal Web site, bigjimindustries.com.Publishers Weekly Senior Editor Charlotte Abbott called the Random House refunds unprecedented, and said neither she nor her colleagues “had ever heard of something like this before.”
Doubleday suggested on Tuesday it was unconcerned about the book’s accuracy. “Memoir is a personal history,” the publisher said in a statement. “By definition, it is highly personal.
“He represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections,” Doubleday said.
Central to Frey’s book, published in 2003, is his assertion that he was charged with assaulting an Ohio police officer with his car, with inciting a riot, with possession of crack cocaine and felony drunk driving — charges that he wrote resulted in a three-month prison term.
The Smoking Gun, owned by Court TV, reported that most of those claims were not borne out by police records or by interviews with police and court officials. The Web site published the police officer’s report of the key 1992 incident which shows Frey was found drunk in his car without a driver’s license but did not, as he wrote, serve time the incident or behave in the outrageous manner portrayed in his book.
Smoking Gun editor William Bastone told Reuters, “In off-the-record interviews with us, Frey admitted embellishing facts in the book for dramatic impact.”
