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I can understand falsification of facts in a memoir if it's minor. Memory is sneaky, and life isn't suited to narrative form.
From what I've heard, however, there are major plot points that were much closer to fiction than fact. I can accept slight embellishment of or trimming off outlying events that aren't of chief importance to the story of your life. I can accept mixing up details here and there. But I hardly think that (from what I understand is) fictional prison time qualifies as minor.
It depends on the style of memoir, too. If Dave Eggers, whose style always feels very "did-this-really-happen?" to me, had pulled this kind of stunt, I'd have found it appropriate for the work. I have not read the book, but I get the impression that Frey's style doesn't suggest that you should take his words with big blocks-o-salt.
I'll try to put this in perspective for myself by referring to my own writing. Some of you have read a short story I posted on LoT, "The Amigo." It's a personal essay about a situation that actually happened. It's what I'd consider memoir, not fiction or auto-biography. The bulk of it, the major points and interactions, definitely happened, and to my memory, exactly that way. But as I suggest that life doesn't befit narrative, I had to soften details or sharpen them (like re-focusing a camera lens) in order to tell the story. For instance, the store greeter was not the man who came to help me lift the wheelchair into the car. It was some other man. In a short story, where sparse is more, adding another character in for one sentence would have detracted. And the greeter is nameless in the story, just like the man who helped me in real life. He might as well have been that man. They were blurry in my memory of the day.
In my adaptation of that situation for film, which pulls me completely out of the story but leaves in a character that quite resembles my mother, I felt much more comfortable embellishing. It is fiction instead of memoir. So that greeter becomes a fully developed fictional character who becomes more important to the story. But I never, ever, would have done this in the memoir short story. That would have been falsification to a degree that I couldn't stand by ethically.
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