[*] So it's not a lie if ...

I have a buddy who runs a secular bookstore in upstate NY, and he told me about this rancid little book called A Million Little Pieces that some customer of his was very certain would sell a million little copies for him. Well, it's sold a few, but it turns out that it's not so much fact as fiction.

The somewhat-astute readers of this blog will read this portion and then start giving me the stink-eye:

Frey has acknowledged to The Smoking Gun that he embellished parts of the book and he said so again Wednesday night on "Larry King Live," stating that alterations were common for memoirs and defending "the essential truth" of "A Million Little Pieces."

"The book is about drug addiction and alcoholism," he said. "The emotional truth is there." (emph added)

Frey's book was first published in 2003 and became a sensation last fall after
Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club. On Wednesday night, Winfrey made a surprise phone call to King's show and supported Frey.

"If you're an addict whose life has been moved by this story and you feel that what James went through was able ... to help you hold on a little bit longer, and you connected to that, that is real. That is real," she said. "And it's ... irrelevant discussing, you know, what happened or did not happen to the police."

Now, I want you to think about something: if a substitute teacher in, say, NJ, stood up in front of her class of, say, 8-yr-olds and began telling them that the facts of some lesson don't matter, but the emotional truth matters, would she be teaching them a lie, or would she be teaching them the truth?

Hm? What do you think? I'm curious.