In 2025, the answer might be: a bestseller. Genre boundaries are increasingly porous, and today’s readers are embracing the hybrid. Welcome to the era of genre-blending fiction, where labels are looser, rules more elastic, and expectations deliciously disrupted.
Then came the controversy: the revelations that much of the book, which had been marketed as a memoir, had been fabricated, culminating in a televised public shaming by Oprah Winfrey in 2006. It wasn’t a memoir at all. More of a novel memoir mashup. A novior, if you like.
It was a moment that seemed to draw a line under Frey's literary future, banishing him to the margins of credibility. He was cancelled.