It used to be so simple. There was fiction and there was nonfiction. Then, with the publication of Mary Karr's memoir "The Liars' Club" and Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" in the mid-1990s, nonfiction burst at the seams. So began the parsing, the long division of nonfiction into memoir, creative nonfiction and personal essay.

Nonfiction, tethered to reality, bore the burden of proof. Fiction, footloose, unaccountable, all but withered away. In the age of reality TV, publishers wanted memoirs, not novels. Now, with the controversy over James Frey and his memoir of addiction and rehabilitation, "A Million Little Pieces," the issue has exploded with the fervor of revolution, especially when it comes to what seems to be a new category, often called the recovery memoir, that publishers don't seem to know how to vet or sell.

"The New York Times bestseller list only has four categories," says an amused Tom Wolfe from his home in New York. "There ought to be a fifth category for autobiography. Or perhaps we should call it handicapped nonfiction."

More than 3 1/2 million copies of "A Million Little Pieces" have been sold since the book was published in 2003, many after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club last fall. But since Jan. 6, when The Smoking Gun online site posted "The Man Who Conned Oprah" — alleging factual errors in Frey's depiction of his criminal record and his role in the deaths of two teenage girls — almost every fact in the memoir has become suspect. Journalists, novelists and memoirists agree that there is no such thing as objective reality. So what do these categories — fiction, nonfiction, memoir — mean? Where do we draw the line between them?

"If it were my choice," Frey said in April 2003, " 'A Million Little Pieces' would be listed as literature. It doesn't really matter, though. What matters is how many people read it and how it affects them."

"Although some of the facts have been questioned," said Winfrey in a call to TV host Larry King at the end of his televised interview with Frey on Jan. 11, "the underlying message of redemption still resonates for me." The facts, Winfrey implied, are pretty much irrelevant. What matters is something Frey and others are calling "emotional truth."

Bill Bastone, editor of The Smoking Gun, disagrees. The former Village Voice reporter feels strongly that since "A Million Little Pieces" is being sold as nonfiction, Frey is "dishonest and unethical."

"I think he crafted it in a way that made it hard for people to figure out," Bastone suggests. "There were no surnames, for example; all of the details had been washed away." Bastone believes that if Winfrey weren't in the mix, the book never would have sold as many copies. But he is surprised by the wagon-circle, tight-lipped response of the author, his agent and his publishers. "These are powerful people who are keeping their mouths zipped while Frey's getting hammered."

Nan A. Talese, who published the book in hardcover at Doubleday, seems weary and wary of the whole subject. "We are not talking about weapons of mass destruction," she says. As for allegations in The Smoking Gun's article, Talese says, "memoir writing is not like mathematics. I am not at all dismayed. The truth is that the book has helped people enormously." It's an impassioned defense, but in some way, it sidesteps the larger question: Is a publisher accountable? Should Doubleday have checked the facts?

Such a question gets at a deep and dirty secret of the publishing industry: There is little vetting of the facts. "Publishers in general will check only for libel," says Wolfe. "For the rest, they accept the author's version." Pulitzer Prize finalist Tim O'Brien, author of many books, including the 1973 memoir "If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home" (one of the earliest books to be labeled "creative nonfiction"), says that when his memoir was published, "I wondered if anybody would vet it, to see if I had been in the Army. But nobody ever did. I could've just made it up."

"Publishers," argues Michael Hoyt, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, "have abandoned their role as gatekeepers. A publisher who says it doesn't matter, well ..." He trails off in disbelief.

What, exactly, is a memoir? "The work did not have the strength I felt was going to be needed," Frey noted in an essay written just after publication of his book. "It was not as simple as I wanted it to be, it was not able to carry the emotions I needed to express to tell the story." Finally, he writes, he gave in to a kind of expository writing: "I didn't think or analyze or struggle or try, it just came from me, just came to the page, came from my mind and from my heart."

A new breed of book — part memoir, part nonfiction — seems to be evolving, or so the critics say. Vivian Gornick, author of a book on the subject, "The Situation and the Story," believes that the novel has reached "a point of stasis." Modernism has left us without story, and that, Gornick claims, "has become wearisome."

"I do believe it's becoming a hybrid form," says Gornick of recent memoirs, citing author W.G. Sebald, whose books, mixes of memory, history, observation and image, strike many critics as the wave of the future.

Samuel Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, disagrees. "To me, the memoir should mean nonfiction. ... Frey gets to invent things that never happened and pass them off as truth. Memoir has become in publishing circles widely accepted as a synonym for 'Make it up if you want to, we don't care as long as it sells.' "

Freedman refers to Truman Capote's famous "In Cold Blood." "When the book came out, people assumed that Capote had this fabulous ability to recall, could assemble themes without a note. ... In time, we've discovered that parts were fictionalized." This hasn't affected sales of the book. And it probably won't hurt "A Million Little Pieces" either.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Steven Barrie-Anthony contributed to this report.