fawning author of piece misses the point entirely. half of what sunk james frey was that his book was purportedly a memoir, moreover one presenting him as a tough guy; the other half was how revolting his fetishization of addiction-and-recovery culture was given that he, you know, made most of it up.
the same goes for laura albert. though obviously and openly fiction, her (crappy by any yardstick) novel's sex-trade fetishization of good ol' white trash's *only* defense was that there was allegedly *some* real-life, experiential truth behind it. turns out it's just more "highbrow" nyc lit-scene porn of the "other," dredged straight from the mythic swamps of flyover country.
agreed, the suckers who got hot for this deserve every "deception" they've suffered. but authorship *does* affect the meaning of a text, some more than others. if, say, pinero turned out to be some east-coast literati scumbag, *short eyes* would be flat-out offensive. and laura albert makes *deliverance* look affectionate and evenhanded.
