Breadmaking, By Nan Talese
What did publishing icon Nan Talese know (about Frey's book), and when did she know it? Timothy Noah writes on Slate of a 2003 article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune by Deborah Caulfield Rybak, questioning Frey's credibility. One Rybak citation concerned the book's very first paragraph! Frey contended that he'd awakened in an airplane, missing teeth, broken, and bruised, with "a hole" in his cheek. Frey's friend, Keith Bray, says otherwise. Noah says:

Rybak also talked to several airline employees and was told that no flight attendant would ever allow someone onto a plane in that condition because she wouldn't want to take responsibility for evacuating him. "The only way someone would be on a plane in that condition would be on a stretcher and accompanied by a doctor," said Capt. Steve Luckey, chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association's national security committee.

When Rybak flagged these credibility problems to Talese, did Talese stand steadfastly by her author? Er, not exactly:

"You have to remember when someone is writing in the first person, it is their memory as they recall it," she said in an interview. "And memory is very selective; there's no such thing as the whole story. If they took a lie-detector test it would probably be true, but if that person had a witness all the way through, maybe it didn't exactly happen that way. But that's how they see it."

This is more or less what Talese would later say in response to The Smoking Gun's findings: Memoirs hew to a different standard because memories are faulty. That's true up to a point—one that falls well short of Frey's gaudier inventions. It certainly doesn't extend to changing people's names without informing readers in the text, another problem Rybak flagged to Talese. Talese acknowledged this error more directly. "It's a total slip-up that we didn't have a disclaimer page," she told the Star Trib. "I'm embarrassed."

Yeah, embarrassed all the way to the bank.