Ten years ago this month, the name James Frey became a byword for autobiographical malfeasance when the website The Smoking Gun revealed what discerning readers already knew: His memoir A Million Little Pieces, about overcoming drug addiction, was a fusillade of lies. As the fallout commenced and the spectacle flared, one waited for the salient point to be emphasized: only half the scandal should have been over Frey’s fabrications. The other half should have been over his faultless inability to make friends with English sentences. Frey had lots of work to do before he could have been considered even a bad writer.

As a culture we’re not much interested in the booming inanity of a bestseller’s prose. What matters to us is a true story, and so it was Frey’s brazen mendacity that snared our attention. And of course we delighted in seeing him meet ruin, one brought on by what seemed his own machismo, hubris, and greed. It’s virtually a law of nature that we should applaud when the popular and powerful engineer their own demise. The only people who don’t applaud such a demise are among those who share in the popularity and power, since they must be uneasily aware of how tenuous their own perches are. But we are each of us, to one degree or another, vulnerable to such uncovering; every public persona is a put-on. The British rogue writer Willie Donaldson once imparted this snippet of wisdom:

The version of ourselves we present to the world bears no resemblance to the truth. If we knew the truth about each other we could take no one seriously. There isn’t one of us who could afford to be caught. That’s all life is. Trying not to be found out.

When Frey was found out, he indeed deserved to swing, but he shouldn’t have been the only one swinging. A book doesn’t arrive in the world by its author alone. Frey’s publisher, Nan Talese, was equally culpable in the duping; by her own admission, she didn’t vet the manuscript, and this despite the fact that Frey had originally attempted to peddle the book as a novel. That’s all you need to know about our literary coordinates in this country: As a novel, A Million Little Pieces didn’t measure up, but as a memoir it was tagged with the usual clichés, “brutally honest” and such. Then and now readers prefer memoirs to novels as they cling to the philistine belief that nonfiction is truer than fiction. Let’s not forget Oscar Wilde’s quip in his essay “The Critic as Artist”: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Fiction is that mask.

Of course Oprah Winfrey was in her own mechanistic way responsible for the Frey ruckus. If she and her mafia had been more literate—if they hadn’t been so hell-bent on hawking to the public a “true” tale of uplift and deliverance, so eager to applaud the exhausted memoir formula of confession and redemption, of travesty en route to triumph—they might have been able to detect the deceit that wafts from the opening lines of Frey’s story. They were somehow okay believing that he was allowed to board a commercial fight without a ticket or wallet, with a broken nose, swollen eyes, and clothes “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.”

Every book is true or false in its sentences before it’s true or false in its facts. That’s part of what Wilde means in his essay “The Decay of Lying” when he suggests that the “truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style.” Near the beginning of Frey’s book, you’ll find this line: “We pull into the Parking Lot and park the car and I finish a bottle and we get out and we start walking toward the Entrance of the Clinic.” That short and seemingly innocuous line has four things wrong with it, not including the faux immediacy of its present tense. First you see the garish and ill-fit upper cases, then you hear the accidental clang of “parking” and “park,” then you realize that the run-on is trying and failing to summon early Hemingway, and then once more, for good measure, you are walloped by ill-fit upper cases. The style, in other words, is trying to distract you from Frey’s deceit: Nothing in the sentence is true, even if everything is a fact. (In his own memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway spoke of “the one true sentence,” and he wasn’t referring to facts—he was referring to style.) Shrewd businesswomen indifferent to the deceit of style, Winfrey and Talese understood that the public wanted its fix, and their emerging unbruised from the scandal they helped create goes to show how much we need our dealers, and how disposable writers, bad and good, really are in the eyes of the public.