Based on a True Story: How Truthful Are We?

I was having a discussion with my father one day and somehow we ended up on the topic of books/films/etc. based on true stories. We talked about the purpose of adding that phrase to a work and what it meant for the person who consumes that work.

For example, look at the author James Frey in his highly popularized and subsequently denounced book A Million Little Pieces. When it was first marketed, it was based on a true story about an addict and the struggles he went through in his life. After it came out that much of what happened in the memoir didn't actually occur, Frey was deemed a monster. He fooled Oprah, which I doubt is a small feat. When accusations of his book came to light, readers and viewers learned that eighty-seven days in prison was only a few hours and hitting an officer while high on crack was actually only a minor offense, to which Frey was released on bail. After his exposure as a fraud, Frey was demonized. We couldn't trust him anymore and anything he said henceforth was obviously a lie.

I feel that what Frey did, whether consciously or not, is borderline brilliant. He blends and blurs the line between truth and falsity. Everyone was caught with their pants down. While he is lambasted for being a liar, I believe that Frey exposed a side of the public that we tend not to think about or purposely ignore outright. I think that when we see the phrase "based on a true story," we don't realize that we have been unconsciously conditioned. We've been conditioned to believe that the film/book is going to take us to a world of depravity, exposing aspects of the world we never considered before. However, after this exposure, there is a sense of hope at the end, that feel-good moment where we know everything is going to be alright. Almost any sports movie based on a true story demonstrates this to us. Frey tears down the wall between fact and fiction, making his readers question how much of his work actually occurred. If we don't know whether or not it's true, do we then feel that we have been deceived and, subsequently, should we disregard his story entirely?

In Frey's note to readers post-exposure, he contends "People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal. [...] My mistake [...] is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience" and "I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require." Frey is a writer and he is also the person being written on. He wants his story told but he also wants a story told. I think all writers have this problem. How much truth is there in what we write? Is it enough to say that it's based on a true story? Is there too much to call it a work of fiction?