The headline writers got the most out of this brouhaha. After James Frey's memoir of self-destruction and redemption, "A Million Little Pieces," was riddled with buckshot from the Smoking Gun Web site, they got to work:

"A Million Little Lies." "Truth, the Whole Truth and Memoirs." "Prose and Cons." "Too Bad to Be True."

It turns out that the "gut-wrenching memoir" that Oprah loved and that sold 3.5 million copies was made of whole cloth as well as whole life. Frey did five hours in custody, not three months in jail. He didn't mix it up with the police officers, and barely knew the girl who died in a train accident for which he said he was blamed. And that's the beginning.

The de-fabrication set off the debate on truth and virtual truth, reality and essential reality, fiction and nonfiction that pits certified members of the "reality-based community" against the post-modern-recontructionist-abstract-expressionist-who-knows-what school of literati.

On the one hand are journalists, notoriously nitpicky souls who believe that if you write about something that happened, dear me, it should have actually happened.

On the other hand, there's Oprah defending the "underlying message of redemption" no matter how much hooey it lay under.

There's also a lit-crit type saying that an author, like a painter, is "free to choose a self-portrait style that may be representational or ... abstract."

And publisher Nan Talese sighs that "we are not talking about weapons of mass destruction."

Meanwhile, Frey punches back at the "latest attempt to discredit me," says the book is 95 percent pure and who cares about the other 5 percent anyway.

Well, I care whether Frey actually had a root canal without Novocain — puleeze. But I also want to know how we got to the moment where a (bad) writer like Frey lies to make himself and his life so much worse than it was. So much down and dirtier, so much ugly and uglier, than reality. It's a reverse Narcissus, an upside-down braggart.

Wasn't memoir once the specialty of the gentry who wanted to spend their dotage telling the world how they reached the pole, won the war, saved the empire? By himself. Today, true somebodies avoid true confessions. But the literature of nobodies is populated by publicized struggles with drugs, incest, depression, obesity, abuse, shoplifting, gambling — the authors digging pits deep enough from which to redeem themselves.

"I am an Alcoholic and I am a Drug Addict and I am a Criminal," wrote Frey eight times. Do bad-guy memoirists now hype up their records for street cred and sales, like a middle-class hip-hopper doing gangsta rap?

The genre of celebrity books has long had a requisite chapter on rehab. Even benign magazines like Jane have a regular feature called "It Happened to Me" — and what happened better be bad. Confessions have been ratcheted up and over-the-top until weight-loss memoirs include lard-eating binges.

The point of a narrative is to hit bottom and bottom is getting lower all the time. The point of hitting bottom is redemption and being welcomed into the knighthood of survivors.

In Elie Wiesel's latest novel, "The Time of the Uprooted," one character laments the strange competition for the title of survivor: "Everybody wanted to be one. No need to have undergone a selection at Birkenau or the tortures of Treblinka ... if everyone is a potential or virtual survivor, then no one is a true survivor."

This brings us to one of the sorriest side effects of fabrications and their justification. In one of those odd turns of fate, the new Oprah pick is "Night," the devastating story of Wiesel's adolescence in a concentration camp.

"Night" has been labeled both an autobiographical novel and a memoir. But "Night," written by the man who has borne witness to the Holocaust for 60 years, is the gold standard of memoirs in the sense of "memory," a narrative that edits life without fabricating it. In short, it's true. Have Frey and his "virtual truth" supporters cheapened that distinction?

Where does all this slippery thinking take us? The morphing of truth and fiction promotes a world in which facts are "subjective" and reality "flexible." It feeds an indifference to honesty and a belief that every truth is up for grabs. At its most extreme, it lends credibility — street cred — to such frauds as the Holocaust denial.

Did you notice that the new president of Iran calls the Holocaust a "myth"? Someday we'll read about it ... in his memoirs.