James Frey rewrites his story with ‘Endgame’ trilogy
By Mark Daniell, QMI Agency
When it comes to career reinventions, author James Frey is in a league of his own.
His latest project, Endgame, is a sci-fi series and a real-life puzzle. The prize? $500,000 in gold. It’s in a locked case that’s on display at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. All you have to do is find the place on Earth where the key that will unlock the gold is located.
But first, a little history.
After his famous dustup with Oprah Winfrey following the news that he’d fabricated parts of his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and its follow-up, My Friend Leonard, Frey became a pariah in the publishing industry.
He wasn’t fazed.
The writer bounced back with his Los Angeles-set Bright Shiny Morning in 2008. He followed that with his best-selling series of young-adult science-fiction books, The Lorien Legacies.
Frey also found time to reimagine the life of Jesus Christ in his 2011 “fiction” book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.
“I don’t ever want to have a career that you can pin down,” Frey says animatedly in a mid-afternoon interview at the head office of his Canadian publisher. “I always admired (the director) Stanley Kubrick because he never did the same thing twice. If you look at his films, they’re completely different from each other. It was just him, doing whatever he wanted. I always thought that was the way to do it, so that’s what I’ve tried to do.”