{"id":786,"date":"2008-08-02T13:45:11","date_gmt":"2008-08-02T20:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/08\/the-us-antihero-james-frey\/"},"modified":"2008-08-02T14:02:19","modified_gmt":"2008-08-02T21:02:19","slug":"the-us-antihero-james-frey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/08\/02\/the-us-antihero-james-frey\/","title":{"rendered":"The US antihero: James Frey"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the Times Online UK<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

August 2, 2008<\/p>\n

The US antihero: James Frey<\/h1>\n

Author James Frey talks about ambition, Oprah, and his new life\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

<\/span>Alan Franks<\/span><\/p>\n

Going along the clean and orderly main street of tiny Amagansett, way out at the end of Long Island, you don\u2019t see the place as an obvious home for one of the most notorious US antiheroes. Never in modern America has a man been more publicly hissed at for writing about his life than 38-year-old James Frey, author of the bestselling A Million Little Pieces. This told the story of the war he had waged, and won, against cocaine and alcohol addiction. It was a raging, blood-spitting tour de force, powering its way in the rawest prose through degradation and near-death to the green shoots of recovery. It was a young man\u2019s journey as ground-breaking as Jack Kerouac\u2019s On the Road half a century before. America was hooked. Oprah Winfrey couldn\u2019t put it down, and after her massively influential TV book club made it a must-read in September 2005, its sales soared higher still and it became the fastest-selling title in the club\u2019s ten-year history.<\/p>\n

The trouble was, some of the stuff in the book wasn\u2019t true, even though it was billed as non-fiction. When Oprah got him on the show to explain, in January the following year, she called him a liar and went for him like a hell-cat.<\/p>\n

The audience carried on booing him through the commercial breaks. The public picked up the habit and heckled him in the streets of New York, Boston, small towns, wherever he happened to be. Doing a Frey came to mean passing fiction off as fact. The many discrepancies between his book and what had actually happened, or hadn\u2019t, were first brought to light by the investigative website The Smoking Gun. The most serious was that while the Frey of the memoir has served three months in jail for hitting a cop with his car, assault with a deadly weapon and violent resistance to arrest, the Frey of real life has done just five hours, after being issued with two traffic tickets. According to police, he was polite and well behaved. There were many more discrepancies, including his part in the death of a young woman, which turned out to be negligible, and an attack which left him needing 40 stitches to the face (no signs of such surgery today).<\/p>\n

These and others were then chewed over remorselessly by the press. They were seen as important not just because they were made up, or exaggerated, but because of their impact on the rest of the story, particularly the question of how its troubled young hero is going to face the consequences of his crimes.<\/p>\n

Frey\u2019s fall from grace was a mighty and public one. Barely a few months before his exposure, the people stopping him on the sidewalks were doing so in order to praise him for his fearless honesty. Some wanted just to touch him. Now they wanted to sneer. His publisher and agent dropped him, and Warner Bros scrapped its plans for the movie. The Frey story was parodied in an episode of South Park. It featured a character called Towelie, a pot-smoking towel who writes a made-up memoir and gets it in the neck from Oprah. Frey and his wife decamped for a while to France \u2013 literary, liberal France \u2013 to escape the vilification.<\/p>\n

Even before it all exploded, Frey, he now says himself, was having trouble with the relationship between fact and fiction, and sought help from a therapist. As he tells it, the problem was that he had become famous overnight, was being hailed as a guru, and couldn\u2019t handle it. \u201cWhen something like that happens to you,\u201d he says, \u201cyour reality changes in a very dramatic way. I lost my anonymity very quickly. If you want to become rich, be a banker. If you want to become famous, be a movie star. But writers, even many of my favourites, I wouldn\u2019t recognise if they walked down the street.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>No such obscurity for him, although here too he appears conflicted, cherishing the privacy of his family life but also wanting acclaim on the scale of Mailer and Hemingway and the other famous bad boys of American letters. There are some critics who are saying this is not such an outrageous hope as it sounds. Mailer, a fan, came to his aid when the storm was at its fiercest, inviting him to his Brooklyn Heights home and explaining how America always needed a villain and was deciding that Frey was it; Bret Easton Ellis, author of the disturbing novel American Psycho, also became a friend. \u201cDuring the Oprah stuff I called him and said, \u2018Dude, what the f*** do I do?\u2019, and he laughed and said, \u2018You have so far exceeded any of the messes I made that I can no longer give you advice.\u2019\u201d And the therapist\u2019s recommendation? \u201cTo separate my own self from the public [self]. Separate myself from the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has done his best. For a start, he\u2019s been clean and sober for 15 years. Amagansett, just one stop from the end of the rural Long Island Rail Road, has an air of comfortable normality: soft furnishing stores, good caf\u00e9s, unimpeachable $3 million homes behind white picket fences. The place doesn\u2019t preen quite like the Hamptons that you come through to get here. It\u2019s friendly but not over-interested. At the boarding house just down from the Freys, the people who run it don\u2019t even know he\u2019s living here.<\/p>\n

When his wife comes into the room, she is stepping straight out of his fiction. There is a woman of the same name, Maya, with whom James falls in love in My Friend Leonard, the 2005 novel which took his story on into the early days of recovery. She is a warm, pretty woman, was with him through the troubles, and the two are plainly devoted. They first met when they were next-door neighbours in Los Angeles and started dating when he returned to the city three years later. She used to work as a creative director at an advertising agency in New York, where they also have a $2.5 million flat in SoHo. On a day like today, with the sun on the pool and a gentle breeze coming up from the beach, Frey\u2019s main job is taking their three-year-old daughter Maren to nursery school.<\/p>\n

He has a new book out, Bright Shiny Morning, which sprawls and brawls across Los Angeles, presenting the lives of the highest achievers and lowest losers in that most stratified of American cities. Capitalising on what has gone before, the publicity blurb bears a single sentence, garishly repeated in blue and red capitals: \u201cNothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.\u201d As if to enrage his enemies still further, Frey has punctuated the book with lists of facts about the development of LA. They might have been taken from an encyclopaedia \u2013 but an unreliable one. When asked whether these \u201cfacts\u201d are true, he gives a crooked smile and says, \u201cAbout 75 per cent.\u201d To his amusement, one reviewer has already been drawn into the game, writing that he hoped the fact checkers at HarperCollins had done their work properly. But this is fiction, billed and marketed as such. Fiction has no responsibilities to literal truth. This begs the obvious question of why Frey did not publish A Million Little Pieces as fiction in the first place. The answer is that he tried, but was turned down by 17 publishers, including Doubleday, which eventually took it, with some reworking, as a memoir.<\/p>\n

The furore that he is only now emerging from was largely about trade descriptions and consumer protection. He will probably never fully escape from it: the notoriety has given him the profile to operate as the thing he wanted to be in the first place, a novelist. The British press did not share the same sense of having been duped. We seemed more ready to accept such notions as the fallibility of memory, the impulse to embellish, the blurring of genre boundaries and, above all, the essential truth at the heart of a work, no matter what protocols may have been flouted in its presentation. That was always his defence, and still is when he feels like acknowledging the attack. This he does not always do, tending to counter the old arguments against him by saying, repeatedly, \u201cI don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oprah\u2019s America was having none of this essential-truth business. The nation, deeply worried about the way the White House had sold the war in Iraq, had a hunger for plain truth.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at Times Online<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the Times Online UK\u00a0 \u00a0 August 2, 2008 The US antihero: James Frey Author James Frey talks about ambition, Oprah, and his new life\u00a0 Alan Franks Going along the clean and orderly main street of tiny Amagansett, way out at the end of Long Island, you don\u2019t see the place as an obvious home […]<\/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-786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversation-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786","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=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}