Back into the Frey
James Frey’s first memoir of recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol was lauded before he was forced to admit there were fabrications, prompting uproar. But Frey is back and unrepentant, Emily Hourican finds and defying the media by lifting the lid on LA in his novel, Bright Shiny Morning
Sunday April 05 2009
Having heard author James Frey on radio, I know he is in combatative form over the controversy that surrounded his first book, A Million Little Pieces.
“Only 15 pages of a 450-page book contained disputed information,” he told his interviewer sternly, so I’m not surprised when he insists to me that the entire episode was “not a big deal. I don’t think people have a problem with it, I think the media has a problem with it.” Later, he will tell me why, indeed, it was all a good thing, and how it made his brand new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, possible.
A Million Little Pieces, the story of Frey’s slow crawl back from the shattered depths of drug and alcohol addiction, was pitched as a memoir, and at first loved and lauded by everyone from Bret Easton Ellis to Gus Van Sant; even chosen by Oprah for her hugely influential book club. Naturally, it then went to number one in the New York Times Bestseller list, where it stayed for 15 weeks. As a writer, Frey had made it, and then some. But then an investigative website, The Smoking Gun, lashed out with claims that much of the book was false. And the good times began to fall apart.
Frey was invited back onto Oprah’s show, where she laid into him, ultimately forcing a confession that there were some fabrications. He was promptly dropped by his agent, and his American publishers offered a refund to readers who felt defrauded by the experience. Later editions carried a Note to the Reader, in which Frey apologises to those “disappointed by my actions”.
It was, depending on your point of view, an outrageous literary fraud, justly brought to book, or a massive storm in a teacup. And Frey is refusing to play the role of contrite sinner any longer. “The public face I showed at the time was more contrite than I really felt,” he tells me over Diet Coke in the Merrion Hotel.
“Absolutely. Some of the disclaimers placed in the books were placed for legal reasons, not because I felt some great need to do it. And they’re all coming out. They’re already out of the British edition of the book.” Not that it didn’t hurt, plenty, at the time.
“I had much more anger than I’m expressing to you, I had a bigger chip on my shoulder than I’m going to tell you.” But despite the humiliation, his self-belief, “at least my belief in my ability to write” never wavered. By so vigorously championing his own cause, he makes it look, rightly or wrongly, as though he is ranged on the side of freedom, the imagination, a certain largeness of vision, against the po-faced, reductionist, letter-of-the-law-abiding forces of puritanism. Under the circumstances, that’s quite a coup to pull off.
This bravado is what spurred him on to write his latest book, and first novel, Bright Shiny Morning, a sparky, sprawling homage to Los Angeles, written at a time when his career looked to be all washed up; he had no agent, no US publisher and for many, the status of Public Enemy Number One.
“I wrote it with a chip on my shoulder. I believed I had more to say. And I did set out to prove something, I did set out to show I wasn’t broken, I wasn’t changed, I wasn’t repentant, I wasn’t apologetic and I wasn’t going to back down or stop. I was going to say, OK, here I am again.” And here indeed he is. Bright Shiny Morning starts with the telling epigraph “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.”
It’s another gauntlet thrown down, an in-joke for the initiated, and two fingers to the media. The book covers huge ground, historically, geographically and emotionally; with a large cast of characters, great chunks of facts — “the average citizen of Los Angeles consumes 250 tacos a year,” of which at least a third are, according to Frey, made up — and a potted history of LA, much of which is also invented, all running side-by-side.
“I always wanted to write a book about LA. LA is one of the great cities of the world and most of the rest of the great cities of the world have been written about — Joyce wrote about Dublin; Hugo, Paris; Dickens, London; Tolstoy, Moscow.” False modesty about the kind of literary company he aspires to keep is not Frey’s thing. “No one had ever taken LA on in a serious way. I wanted to do it. Because of the way the city is, I thought you couldn’t take a single narrative. It’s too big, too disconnected. So there are hundreds of parts that could stand alone, unto themselves, but can also function as something bigger.”
The city is very much the central character of the book, arching over everything, a muse unto itself. And of course, because this is LA, the entertainment industry features heavily, as a beacon of light visible for thousands of miles around, drawing the 100,000 hopefuls who arrive each year, then churning their dreams into dust.
Frey, who is from Cleveland, Ohio, moved to LA when he was 25, and was, briefly, until he thought better of it, almost one of the success stories. He wrote a couple of screenplays for films that got made, and even directed one, and so his insights into that business, though hard-boiled, count.
“I don’t try to be cynical about it I just try to present it as it is. A lot of people move out there because they love movies and they think people are going to embrace them. But it’s the film “business”, and when you’re out there trying to break into it, people will size you up and if they think they can make money off of you, you’ll work, and if they don’t, you won’t. It’s as simple as that.”
Would he like Bright Shiny Morning to be read as a cautionary tale by those naive enough to head for the bright lights with no plan other than ambition? “Yeah, for sure. I think people should know you can move to Los Angeles and your dreams can come true, you can become a worldwide superstar, but the chances are much greater that you will move there and fail, and become something that you don’t want to become.”
Despite a very privileged upbringing — Frey’s father was a successful businessman — he has a fascination for life’s seedy, even sordid, edges, the marginalised world of addicts, hookers, pimps and hustlers. “I know that, growing up, the books I loved were a lot about those things — Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Baudelaire, Rimbaud; you seek out experience. You can’t seek out experience in a bubble of privilege.” This of course is the double-edged sword of affluence for an artist; “I grew up in an upper-middle class American household; I definitely have benefited from my father’s success, but in my life as a writer, I haven’t benefited in any way.”
Towards his own addictions, to alcohol and drugs, Frey shows the same kind of machismo that characterised his attitude to Oprah (of whom he says, “I don’t care what Oprah was. I don’t base my self-worth on the opinion of a TV talkshow host”). He has consistently refused the support of a 12-step programme.
“I just don’t drink, don’t use drugs, I don’t see any positive reason to, they’re not going to do anything but f*** my life up. That’s not to say I don’t sometimes have urges to drink and use drugs, but I know nothing good will come of it. It depends on the day; some days it’s not hard, some days it is. It’s like anything, you get better at it, you get more practised. I am accepting of my situation, which is that the shit will f*** me up if I do it, and so I can’t, and I don’t judge other people for doing it.”
It’s tough talk, but backed by 15 years of sobriety and therefore convincing. During that time he has moved to New York, at the insistence of his wife (“I have a policy in my marriage which is ‘just say yes!”), had two children, aged four and two, and made enough money to indulge his passion for art — on the walls of his apartment are works by Picasso, Matisse and Francis Bacon. It’s been a productive sobriety.
Bright Shiny Morning is open-ended in its conclusions, dispassionate in its presentation of LA and the lives of its protagonists. Deliberately so. “I tried to write from a distance and let the reader decide how they feel about it,” says Frey. “I give the reader a lot of credit, I believe they’re smart, cool, interesting people who want to be presented with challenging material.” This belief has been borne in on him, and is confirmed, by the reaction to A Million Little Pieces. He has received tens of thousands of emails from readers who loved and were greatly moved by the book. Only one in every couple of hundred, he claims, was not supportive. It’s a continuing reaction that reinforces his relief at the dramatic turn his career took. Because yes, Frey has convinced himself that the Smoking Gun exposure was a good thing.
“A lot of good came out of it. I wasn’t comfortable with the way things were. I didn’t like being placed on this pedestal. This work of what I considered literature got taken out of that and placed into this self-help context which it was actually designed to insult. I didn’t want to be that person. I’m a writer, I’m not Wayne Dyer or Deepak Chopra. The controversy pushed it back into the place it belonged, pushed me back into the place I belong, with literary writers.”
In an odd kind of way, Bright Shiny Morning has to both live down the controversy of A Million Little Pieces, as well as live up to the rave reviews it got, even after the exposure. Does he not worry that no other book he writes will quite escape the shadow of his first? “At a certain point, I just don’t think I’ll talk about any more. I’ll talk about it now because it’s the first book after that happened, but if I write books that matter, the more of them I write, the further away from that I get, the less it all matters. If that continues to happen, it will make the controversy not relevant.”
And so he neatly draws a line under the experiences of the last few years. Now, it’s about the future, and the future, to Frey, looks shiny and bright. “When Time magazine wrote their review of Bright Shiny Morning, the headline was “America’s Most Notorious Author Returns”. When I read that I though, f*** yeah, that’s where I always wanted to be. I didn’t get there the way I expected to, it was a little harder and more uncomfortable than I wanted it to be, but that’s where I am, that’s where I’m happy. And that’s where I’m going to stay.”
Bright Shiny Morning is out in paperback; John Murray, £7.99
– Emily Hourican