THERE were signs, years ago, that something was amiss. Like the lengthy Minneapolis Star Tribune article that raised questions about some of the more outlandish vignettes in James Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," shortly after its release in April 2003.
Or the few mainstream critics - the precious few - who expressed gentle skepticism at the B-movie flourishes in the book's tale of drug abuse, crime and recovery. Janet Maslin, in this newspaper, for instance, winkingly noted that a well-meaning fan, writing a "customer review" at Amazon.com, inadvertently extolled Mr. Frey as "a new voice in fiction."
And what was unknowingly foreshadowed in this final passage of a profile of another troubled writer, in The New York Observer of May 21, 2003, struggling with truth and addiction?
"On the nearby coffee table was a copy of 'A Million Little Pieces,' the memoir by the self-rehabilitated drug addict, James Frey. Sticking from it was a business card, which he took out. It said: Jayson Blair, Reporter. Then: The New York Times.
"Jayson Blair looked at it. 'This is my new bookmark,' he said."
Mr. Frey has not disputed the allegations of myriad embellishments in his book, made by the Smoking Gun Web site two weeks ago. Chief among these is his three-month stint in jail, which apparently never happened.
This is not important, Mr. Frey told Larry King, because he has written a "memoir," and it is the book's "essential truth" that matters.
Never mind that over the last three years, as "A Million Little Pieces" was heralded as a masterpiece and questions about his truth-telling were at a low boil, he had professed the exact opposite.
"The only things I changed were aspects of people that might reveal their identity," he told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in July 2003. "Otherwise, it's all true."
Based on such assertions (and with a generous push last fall from Oprah Winfrey, who recommended the book to her club), at least 3.5 million readers laid down good money for the book, and at times it seemed that nearly all of them were chattering about it, with utter devotion, online.
But the truly interesting artifacts in this whole affair are the few, sometimes anonymous, Internet leavings of readers, many with substance abuse histories of their own, who sensed something was wrong long before there was a Smoking Gun exposé.
Certainly, by late last year, with the scrutiny brought on by Ms. Winfrey's endorsement, the skeptical voices had grown diverse and authoritative. And more than Mr. Frey's criminal record was being questioned.
"Having been through treatment," wrote Carol Colleran at Amazon.com in November, "and four other members of my family being through treatment at the facility he so clearly describes, I am offended and angry at him and this book."
Ms. Colleran is a renowned expert on drug and alcohol abuse and a co-author of "Aging and Addiction," a guidebook published in 2002 by the very rehab facility in Minnesota, Hazelden, that Mr. Frey depicts in his memoir.
"There is nothing in the book that is accurate or even remotely true," she wrote.
But who might have been the skeptical soul who left this review at Amazon.com nearly three years ago, just a few weeks after the book's debut?
Date: June 7, 2003
From: A reader
"As an ex-drug abuser and as a writer, I've never been so offended or enraged by a book. ... Notice that the author, though supposedly downing quarts of booze, fistfuls of crack, and incredibly, glue and gasoline, manages to graduate from college, spend a year abroad, keep his friends and support himself. ... I hope some of his 'classmates' at Hazelden decide to blab - or someone chooses to look deeper into the story."
Shortly afterward at the same site, Dr. Larkin Breed, a radiologist from Pleasant Hill, Calif., expressed similar doubts about the infamous scene in which Mr. Frey is forced to undergo a root canal procedure without drugs of any kind.
Date: Aug. 5, 2003
From: lbreed
"I quit reading this book when the author began to describe having his teeth worked on, early in recovery, without analgesia. This would never have happened for a number of reasons. This lowered the author's general credibility to near zero."
Indeed, even as the marketing machinery behind Mr. Frey's book intensified - Amazon.com named it the top pick for 2003 - and a legion of blogs and discussion boards admired its "raw" and "visceral" prose with "ya gotta read this" links to an Amazon or Barnes & Noble shopping cart, an undercurrent of critical analysis was forming.
"The joke is that tens of millions of sobby idiots bought and believed every one of Frey's self-indulgent lies, and accepted his parody of Hemingway laconic narration as high art," wrote John Dolan, an editor of The Exile, an English-language newspaper and Web site based in Moscow, in late 2003.
Just over a year ago, at Amazon, J. North wrote, "I can't believe they tried to pass this off as nonfiction." And in October, a reader from Michigan added that "anyone who has gone through treatment at a center, or works at one, knows that James Frey's description of treatment is largely fictionalized."
Another reader, Lisa Lias, wrote in November, "Maybe this guy did go to Hazelden. But this book is fiction."
Asked recently why she thought so, Ms. Lias, an actor, wrote in an e-mail message, "For my work I have to read a lot of scripts. I know bad dialogue when I see it."
At SmartRecovery.infopop.cc, a discussion site for recovering addicts, a user called jakatak was asked about the book. "Well, if you enjoy a good piece of fiction, I suppose you might like it," he wrote in December. "A national airline allows a person, unattended, to fly with four teeth missing, a hole in the side of his cheek, and blood and vomit on his shirt? Ya, right!"
Mr. Frey has his defenders, including his publishers and Ms. Winfrey. And millions of fans believe his ends justify his means.
But as Mr. Frey retreats into his multimillion-dollar loft and flashes his poetic license, he might do well to take a tour of some of the more confused dialogue now unfolding at some recovery and substance abuse message boards online, if only to solidify the public commitment he has made to never write about himself again.
"I think it upsets me because here's someone who's 13, 10, 8 - or however many years - sober, who has been deceitful, by continuing to tout inaccuracies in his book as factual," wrote a user called Autumn at SoberRecovery.com, a clearinghouse of substance abuse information.
"That, to me, is not a person who comes anywhere close to being what
I might have considered a model of recovery at one time," she
continued. "And I think the same might hold true for most, if not all,
regulars who hang out here. Recovery is important to us."
Copyright 2006 by The New York Times Company