The uproar over James Frey’s misrepresentations in his best-selling memoir is not “just a case about truth-in-labeling or the misrepresentations of one author: after all, there have been plenty of charges about phony or inflated memoirs in the past, most notably about Lillian Hellman’s 1973 book ‘Pentimento.’ It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth.”