{"id":1430,"date":"2009-03-13T13:00:42","date_gmt":"2009-03-13T20:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/03\/james-freys-bad-idea-interview\/"},"modified":"2009-03-13T13:00:42","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T20:00:42","slug":"james-freys-bad-idea-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/03\/13\/james-freys-bad-idea-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"James Frey’s BAD IDEA Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

click to read this interview at BAD IDEA magazine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The BAD IDEA Interview: James Frey<\/h1>\n

\n

\"The<\/a>James Frey, author of\u00a0A Million Little Pieces<\/em>,My Friend Leonard<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Bright Shiny Morning<\/em>, is one of the most controversial writers of the noughties….\u00a0\u00a0BAD 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.<\/p>\n

BAD IDEA: Since the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces, you\u2019ve had a long time to reflect on the nature of memoir. How do you think people perceive it as a genre?<\/em><\/p>\n

James Frey: Memoir is whatever you want it to be, it\u2019s a book based on your life. Obviously I\u2019m not a guy who believes it should be factually perfect, and frankly I don\u2019t think any of them are. Any book that has a disclaimer in front of it means it\u2019s not factually perfect, it means they made shit up, if they didn\u2019t, they wouldn\u2019t have a disclaimer, and 100% of them have disclaimers.<\/p>\n

It also depends on what kind of book you want to write. I don\u2019t think of my books as memoirs – I set out to write works of literature, and the tag \u201cmemoir\u201d got slapped on the side of it by the publishers.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s written, then just write the book you want to write, and fuck the rest of it.<\/p>\n

<\/a>BI: Did you find it got co-opted as a self-help book?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: I don\u2019t think anyone tried to sell my book as self-help, I wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

BI: So was that your main impetus for writing, to rail against the self-help industry?<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em>\u00a0or [Jack Kerouac’s]\u00a0On The Road<\/em>, the work of Charles Bukowski, some of the work of Norman Mailer.\u00a0I 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\u2019t care about the factuality of it or not, and later everyone wants to pick it apart, and that\u2019s fine if they do\u2026<\/p>\n

I draw parallels with fine art a lot, and when Picasso painted self-portraits in a Cubist style people didn\u2019t freak out and say \u201cMy God! It\u2019s not perfect!\u201d When artists take liberties with visual art, people don\u2019t freak out, but people freak out about this. But y\u2019know, I\u2019m happy that my books aren\u2019t considered memoirs any more.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

BI: So do you get riled by other memoirs that haven\u2019t had to print a disclaimer?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: Everyone. Every one.<\/p>\n

I hate the disclaimer, but the disclaimer\u2019s coming out of all the books. It\u2019s already out of all the European editions, and comes out of the American edition in June.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>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?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: No, I\u2019ve 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\u2019t of, and I\u2019ve apologised once, on a talk show. I haven\u2019t apologised since and I won\u2019t. It\u2019s 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\u2019s a good thing, and I don\u2019t really care about the other stuff.<\/p>\n

BI: Would you say you\u2019re deliberately working in a grey area between memoir and fiction?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: I don\u2019t think memoir and fiction, just in the grey area of what is truth. Something doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s perfectly factually accurate then you\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n

Truth is all subjectivity and perspective and I don\u2019t see why people are shocked that that is bled into literature. We watch reality TV, and there\u2019s nothing real about it. You watch a documentary and there isn\u2019t necessarily any factually accurate presentation of anything, it\u2019s a documentarian\u2019s thesis and their effort to prove their thesis.<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Yeah I do, I think it\u2019s bullshit a lot of the time. All I can do is keep writing books and do what I do. I don\u2019t talk a lot about\u00a0A Million Little Pieces<\/em>\u00a0when I\u2019m living my day-to-day life and I\u2019ll talk about it this time and probably after this I won\u2019t talk about it any more.<\/p>\n

All I care about is that the book is still read, and it is, people still buy it, people still read it, and that\u2019s what matters to me, not what someone on an American TV talk show has to say about me.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>BI: So what are you working on at the moment?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: I\u2019m writing another book, my idea of what it would be like if the Messiah was walking the streets of New York City right now.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019s just laughable. So I\u2019m writing a version of what the Bible would be like if it were written today.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0The dude didn\u2019t get strung up on the cross because they loved him. He won\u2019t be crucified [in the book] but he won\u2019t meet a happy ending.<\/p>\n

BI: Do you find a lot of hypocrisy in Christianity then?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: There are powerful hypocrisies in any major institution whether it\u2019s religious whether it\u2019s the media, whether its political institutions, there\u2019s hypocrisies everywhere in the world. I mean, I\u2019m a hypocrite, you\u2019re a hypocrite, we\u2019re all hypocrites in some way. But I\u2019m going to go after Christian hypocrisy and Christian intolerance.<\/p>\n

BI: Do you think there are still things in your own life that you want to write about?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: I won\u2019t write anything about me where I\u2019m the protagonist ever again. I\u2019m just not interested in it right now; there are plenty of other things I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

BI: Would you ever try your hand at journalism, or non-fiction writing?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: Absolutely not, I\u2019m not a journalist. I have no interest in it. I want to create pieces of literary art, I\u2019m pretentious enough to believe that\u2019s still possible and that it might still matter. I grew up and wanted to be a writer, a book writer. So that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do. In journalism you\u2019re constrained by a lot of rules. I mean, if you read a page of anything I\u2019ve ever written I don\u2019t follow formal rules or writing. I don\u2019t use normal systems of grammar, normal systems of punctuation, I don\u2019t use paragraph indentation, I don\u2019t use quotation marks, I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

BI: How is the editing process for you? Writing in such a free style must leave you with a lot to cut out.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

JF:\u00a0A Million Little Pieces<\/em>\u00a0got cut, we cut about 70 or 80 pages out of it, but the last two books I\u2019ve written have hardly been edited at all. I write very clean, I\u2019m pretty precise the first time through.<\/p>\n

BI: Does that come naturally to you?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: No, it\u2019s very laborious. I try to make what I write read like it\u2019s effortless, but it takes a lot of effort.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>BI: What do you think you\u2019ve learnt about writing since you sat down to write your first book?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: I think that I\u2019m a better writer than I was when I started, but again, \u201cbetter\u201d is just a word, it\u2019s a subjective term. I\u2019m 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\u2019t even know if I could do it, now that\u2019s not even a question. It\u2019s not \u201ccan I do it?\u201d, it\u2019s \u201cwhat\u2019s it going to be?\u201d It\u2019s not \u201cwill it get published?\u201d, it\u2019s \u201chow will it be published?\u201d<\/p>\n

BI: That\u2019s quite a luxurious position for a writer to be in.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a great position of luxury. But when I\u2019m at home the attitude is the same as it\u2019s always been: I just try and write the best book I can.<\/p>\n

BI: What other people or areas of society are in the back of your mind, that you might write a book about?<\/em><\/p>\n

JF: I\u2019ll probably write a book about American society in the 20th\u00a0century, like a 1000-page book that spans most of the\u00a0century. So about a lot of things – it would cover economics, race, class and politics.<\/p>\n

My wife and I – one of our children died last summer, so I\u2019ll probably write about death, and loss.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll see, when I\u2019m finished with this book I\u2019ll start trying to figure out what the next one is.<\/p>\n

BI: What about politics?<\/em><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t give a shit about politics, it has no weight on what I do.<\/p>\n

Although I do think it\u2019s hilarious that Obama\u2019s [memoir] has been embellished and certainly no one cared about that. You can find stuff on the Internet about that if you really want\u2026<\/p>\n

* \u00a0 \u00a0 * \u00a0 \u00a0 *<\/p>\n

<\/span>James is appearing at Miller\u2019s Academy in London tonight, at the ICA in London tomorrow, and then Waterstone\u2019s in Dublin on Friday. Full details\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>[ click to read this interview at BAD IDEA magazine<\/a> ]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

click to read this interview at BAD IDEA magazine The BAD IDEA Interview: James Frey James Frey, author of\u00a0A Million Little Pieces,My Friend Leonard\u00a0and\u00a0Bright Shiny Morning, is one of the most controversial writers of the noughties….\u00a0\u00a0BAD IDEA caught up with him in Glasgow over the phone, to talk about everything from the nature of memoir […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversation-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}