James Frey’s Morning After
What’s it like to write a mega-selling memoir, then become a household word for “liar”? Was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces an ex-junkie’s con job, part of a proud literary tradition, or just the standard hype of an increasingly embattled publishing industry? In his first U.S. interview since Oprah nailed him, in 2006, Frey tells his version of the story, including how his new novel, his family, and the late Norman Mailer helped him survive the resulting maelstrom, sober all the way.
by EVGENIA PERETZJune 2008
The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit.
Now he would just as soon forget the whole mess. He fears and loathes the media. He has been press shy since his January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and doesn’t plan to speak to the press again after this interview.
“Frankly, I don’t even care,” he says, exasperated, after I pushed him on the subject of the scandal for the 16th time. “I don’t care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book. It’s just a story. It’s just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I’ve broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it.”