click to read this interview at BAD IDEA magazine
The BAD IDEA Interview: James Frey
James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces,My Friend Leonard and Bright Shiny Morning, is one of the most controversial writers of the noughties…. BAD IDEA caught up with him in Glasgow over the phone, to talk about everything from the nature of memoir to Christian intolerance, Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama.
BAD IDEA: Since the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces, you’ve had a long time to reflect on the nature of memoir. How do you think people perceive it as a genre?
James Frey: Memoir is whatever you want it to be, it’s a book based on your life. Obviously I’m not a guy who believes it should be factually perfect, and frankly I don’t think any of them are. Any book that has a disclaimer in front of it means it’s not factually perfect, it means they made shit up, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a disclaimer, and 100% of them have disclaimers.
It also depends on what kind of book you want to write. I don’t think of my books as memoirs – I set out to write works of literature, and the tag “memoir” got slapped on the side of it by the publishers.
I think it depends on what you want to do. If you want to make a perfect history of your life, then make it factually accurate, if you want to tell an entertaining story and you want it to be readable, and you want to take some risks in terms of how it’s written, then just write the book you want to write, and fuck the rest of it.
BI: Did you find it got co-opted as a self-help book?
JF: I don’t think anyone tried to sell my book as self-help, I wouldn’t have participated in doing that. If anything that book was designed to be a gob of spit in the face of the self-help industry. It counters everything they say, everything they hold holy it basically spits on.
BI: So was that your main impetus for writing, to rail against the self-help industry?
JF: My main impetus for writing was to write a book. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to create literature. In creating that book, I thought of it in line with [Henry Miller’s]Tropic Of Cancer or [Jack Kerouac’s] On The Road, the work of Charles Bukowski, some of the work of Norman Mailer. I tried to write a book that took radical steps in terms of sentence construction and how pages were laid out, how paragraphs were built, how the story was told. I didn’t care about the factuality of it or not, and later everyone wants to pick it apart, and that’s fine if they do…
I draw parallels with fine art a lot, and when Picasso painted self-portraits in a Cubist style people didn’t freak out and say “My God! It’s not perfect!” When artists take liberties with visual art, people don’t freak out, but people freak out about this. But y’know, I’m happy that my books aren’t considered memoirs any more.
And I thought it was ironic that the media in the US picked my book apart while allowing every politician, including the one currently in office, to lie their fucking asses off pretty much every time they open their mouths.
BI: So do you get riled by other memoirs that haven’t had to print a disclaimer?
JF: Everyone. Every one.
I hate the disclaimer, but the disclaimer’s coming out of all the books. It’s already out of all the European editions, and comes out of the American edition in June.
BI: After the revelations about the book came out, you appeared on Oprah, and you seemed penitent and apologetic about what happened. Do you still feel sorry for writing in a way that misled people?
JF: No, I’ve never apologised about how I wrote that book and I never will. I made some mistakes in the marketing of it and I said some things on TV talk shows I probably shouldn’t of, and I’ve apologised once, on a talk show. I haven’t apologised since and I won’t. It’s a book – people read it and it moves them and it affects them and it entertains them. Maybe it changes the way they think about books, the way they think about how things can be written, and that’s a good thing, and I don’t really care about the other stuff.
BI: Would you say you’re deliberately working in a grey area between memoir and fiction?
JF: I don’t think memoir and fiction, just in the grey area of what is truth. Something doesn’t have to be factually accurate to be true, and I think especially in America today if you pick up a newspaper and you think that it’s perfectly factually accurate then you’re kidding yourself. And I think so in the UK too, probably – how can you read a newspaper from a conservative point of view and from a liberal point of view, and read stories about the same thing and have them be radically different stories?
Truth is all subjectivity and perspective and I don’t see why people are shocked that that is bled into literature. We watch reality TV, and there’s nothing real about it. You watch a documentary and there isn’t necessarily any factually accurate presentation of anything, it’s a documentarian’s thesis and their effort to prove their thesis.
BI: There are TV shows like The Hills that work in the space between fact and fiction that are feted, and yet your books have got savaged. Do you get exasperated by that?
Yeah I do, I think it’s bullshit a lot of the time. All I can do is keep writing books and do what I do. I don’t talk a lot about A Million Little Pieces when I’m living my day-to-day life and I’ll talk about it this time and probably after this I won’t talk about it any more.
All I care about is that the book is still read, and it is, people still buy it, people still read it, and that’s what matters to me, not what someone on an American TV talk show has to say about me.
BI: So what are you working on at the moment?
JF: I’m writing another book, my idea of what it would be like if the Messiah was walking the streets of New York City right now.
I’m still playing with the ideas of truth. People spout off about the Bible being true, but the idea that they are is a joke. The idea that these books that were written 40 to 120 years after this guy was alive are somehow perfectly factually accurate, and that tell these fantastical stories – the Earth created in 7 days, Moses parting the sea, I mean there are thousands of examples – are somehow true, to me it’s just laughable. So I’m writing a version of what the Bible would be like if it were written today.
I think if the Messiah were walking the streets right now most Christians would be revolted by him; most of the so called holy people would find him repugnant the way most people found Christ when he was alive. The dude didn’t get strung up on the cross because they loved him. He won’t be crucified [in the book] but he won’t meet a happy ending.
BI: Do you find a lot of hypocrisy in Christianity then?
JF: There are powerful hypocrisies in any major institution whether it’s religious whether it’s the media, whether its political institutions, there’s hypocrisies everywhere in the world. I mean, I’m a hypocrite, you’re a hypocrite, we’re all hypocrites in some way. But I’m going to go after Christian hypocrisy and Christian intolerance.
BI: Do you think there are still things in your own life that you want to write about?
JF: I won’t write anything about me where I’m the protagonist ever again. I’m just not interested in it right now; there are plenty of other things I’m interested in. There are plenty of other stories I want to tell or issues I want to tackle than writing about some version of myself.
BI: Would you ever try your hand at journalism, or non-fiction writing?
JF: Absolutely not, I’m not a journalist. I have no interest in it. I want to create pieces of literary art, I’m pretentious enough to believe that’s still possible and that it might still matter. I grew up and wanted to be a writer, a book writer. So that’s what I’m going to do. In journalism you’re constrained by a lot of rules. I mean, if you read a page of anything I’ve ever written I don’t follow formal rules or writing. I don’t use normal systems of grammar, normal systems of punctuation, I don’t use paragraph indentation, I don’t use quotation marks, I don’t set my words down the page like most other people do. The couple times I wrote for magazines they just fuck my shit up. They change it all to take every individual stamp I place on it away from it.
BI: How is the editing process for you? Writing in such a free style must leave you with a lot to cut out.
JF: A Million Little Pieces got cut, we cut about 70 or 80 pages out of it, but the last two books I’ve written have hardly been edited at all. I write very clean, I’m pretty precise the first time through.
BI: Does that come naturally to you?
JF: No, it’s very laborious. I try to make what I write read like it’s effortless, but it takes a lot of effort.
BI: What do you think you’ve learnt about writing since you sat down to write your first book?
JF: I think that I’m a better writer than I was when I started, but again, “better” is just a word, it’s a subjective term. I’m just trying out different things, trying to tell a story in different ways, playing with structure, playing with larger architectural issues related with building a book. Before I wrote the first book I didn’t even know if I could do it, now that’s not even a question. It’s not “can I do it?”, it’s “what’s it going to be?” It’s not “will it get published?”, it’s “how will it be published?”
BI: That’s quite a luxurious position for a writer to be in.
JF: I mean, I feel really lucky that I get to write whatever I want, and that I have really supportive publishers, and that things have gone really well for me in many ways. When I sit down to actually write the book, I don’t really worry about those issues in the future, I worry about a word at a time and a sentence at a time and paragraph at a time and a page at a time, and I believe that if you worry about what you need to do at the moment then all the other shit will sort itself out when it needs to.
For sure I feel really fortunate I get to go what I do and travel and do interviews, I feel really fortunate that people read my books and are interested in them – it’s a great position of luxury. But when I’m at home the attitude is the same as it’s always been: I just try and write the best book I can.
BI: What other people or areas of society are in the back of your mind, that you might write a book about?
JF: I’ll probably write a book about American society in the 20th century, like a 1000-page book that spans most of the century. So about a lot of things – it would cover economics, race, class and politics.
My wife and I – one of our children died last summer, so I’ll probably write about death, and loss.
At some point I just want to write a detective book, sort of a perverted hard-boiled detective book, just because I like PI books. We’ll see, when I’m finished with this book I’ll start trying to figure out what the next one is.
BI: What about politics?
I don’t give a shit about politics, it has no weight on what I do.
Although I do think it’s hilarious that Obama’s [memoir] has been embellished and certainly no one cared about that. You can find stuff on the Internet about that if you really want…
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James is appearing at Miller’s Academy in London tonight, at the ICA in London tomorrow, and then Waterstone’s in Dublin on Friday. Full details here.