James frey, 'A million Little Pieces' C/D?

In an October 26 show entitled "The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night," Winfrey hailed Frey's graphic and coarse book as "like nothing you've ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we'd come in the next morning saying, 'What page are you on?'" In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey's Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, "I'm crying 'cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much."

But a six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun reveals that there may be a lot less to love about Frey's runaway hit, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, has sat atop The New York Times nonfiction paperback best seller list for the past 15 weeks. Next to the latest Harry Potter title, Nielsen BookScan reported Friday, Frey's book sold more copies in the U.S. in 2005--1.77 million--than any other title, with the majority of that total coming after Winfrey's selection.

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."

In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls. "I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true."

it's weird, it seems like everybody i ran into was reading it at one point.

does anyone have any opinion about why he would capitalize "The Room" or "The Van" or whatever? i thought that seemed really amateur, and that if i were an editor i'd get rid of that.

i'm too lazy to google it, but aren't his parents (or at least his father) kind of well-known?

Nope, never heard of it or him. I'm usually reasonably up on whatever the popular books are just because I see them get checked out so often from the new books lobby here -- you should see the grief I get from people desperate to read the friggin' Da Vinci Code -- but this dude's new to me. As it is I think I'd rather reread Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight.

and i wonder if our cultures constant desire to reward transgressive, esp. rempetive/transgressive narratives makes a critical deconstruction on a popular level impossible...

and i wonder if freys refusal to play the usual games (he found himself. he searched his soul, alleuia) but get the rewards (OPRAH) was really really clever, a kind of postioning himself as an inside outsider (gawker also liked the book) decentralises/destabilised the life time movie of the week drugs are bad mmmkay story that people expect from him...

(ie leroys strangeness is that we on the radical left have played for decades that sexual orientation/gender are a matter more of aesthetic presentation/personae building then any kind of essentalism but we also get sad for people being mean to essentialised gay people, as a culture there is a mutal agreed upon polite tension that seems more and more untennable, leroy destabilises the narrative of the poor rentboy fag waif who pulled himself out by his talents, in a simmilar way as frey does)

(and yeah, they self aggrandise, and they are ego sluts, and all of that sort of thing, but i realyl do think that leroy and frey are interesting, messy, complicated writers, nto just persones, but writers, who do things with genre i thot was impossible...so i think rewarding them for that may not be a bad thing)

(and there are problems w. their writing, and queer folk/addicts who have been really seriously fucked over for their behaviour are most likely being exploited here, but anymore or less then oprahs/van sant's mawkish seeking of domestic melodrama?)

This somewhat begs the question.

one aggro asshole guarding turf from another

(maybe my workplace is blocking that site for naughty words/being russian)

This made me roll My Eyes every time it Came Up.

I am surprised he stopped short of doing Dickinsonian double dashes.

http://nealpollack.com/archives/2006/01/index.html

Since writing this, I realized that once Law & Order: Criminal Intent does the inevitable episode where Goren fakes out a puppy-murdering James Frey/JT Leroy composite, then the expose will be awesome once again.

I'm with the Milkmaid on that- going for a sort of Teutonic feel, maybe trying to cozy up to the magic-realist crowd that reads anything if it's in translation (which would also account for the poor writing, 'cause he could totally blame the non-existent translator for that)

1) there are like zillions of these recoculously precise descriptions of, say, what happens to be on frey's tray at lunch, item-by-item rundowns that suggest he's either rainman or a classically overembellishing liar

2) the spewing fluids etc. are straight out of evil dead 2--great fun but whole-cloth fancy, and soooo over the top that both its believability and impact go straight out the window. someone's excited idea of what a really bad rehab might be like. wait, maybe the wafer-thin mint bit from the meaning of life is a better comparison

1) there are like zillions of these recoculously precise descriptions of, say, what happens to be on frey's tray at lunch, item-by-item rundowns that suggest he's either rainman or a classically overembellishing liar

2) the spewing fluids etc. are straight out of evil dead 2--great fun but whole-cloth fancy, and soooo over the top that both its believability and impact go straight out the window. an excitable lad's idea of what a really bad rehab might be like. wait, maybe the wafer-thin mint bit from the meaning of life is a better comparison

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=peopleNews&storyID=2006-01-11T183418Z_01_EIC166779_RTRIDST_0_PEOPLE-ARTS-FREY-DC.XML

Random House IS NOT Offering Refunds!

"Contrary to erroneous published reports, Random House is not offering a special refund on A Million Little Pieces. It has long been standard Random House Inc procedure to direct consumers who want a refund on any of the tens of thousands of books we publish back to their retail place of purchase, unless they purchased the book directly from us in which case we refund it. Yesterday we had 15 calls to our customer service line specific to A Million Little Pieces and fewer than that today."

Hm. Blog-entry headline to the contrary, the paragraph in quotation marks (which is unattributed) seems to say that Random House IS offering refunds; the sole point of difference between this and the Reuters story is that refunds are not "special" but simply "standard Random House procedure."

i heard a gunshot, and closed my eyes tightly, as tight as i closed them the first time i sucked a dick for kedimine. to my shock, i wasnt dead. i opened them again, as wide as i opened them the first time i shot up, and saw yukis fragile oriental body lying limp on the oriental rug. what had happened? i thought. then i saw the sniper in the window of the building across the beautiful and cold russian avenue

I didn't know what exactly what had just happened, but I knew one thing: I I had to leave Moscow. Sure,Mother Russia had been good to me, but I couldn't suckle at her vodka-soaked teat any longer. Things were just too heavy.

The sniper's bullet grazed my ear as I rolled out of view, the sudden burst of adrenalin overcoming the kedimine. I was now lying flat on my stomach on the floor across from Yuki. Her dead eyes stared at me, wide as the day we first met.

Pinned down like one of Nabakov's butterflies, I was trapped with nowhere to run. The sniper's laser sight was scanning the room, looking for me.

And I was still high.

Suddenly, out of nowhere I felt a vibration coming from my pocket. My pager. Who the fuck was paging me at a time like this? I took it out of my pocket and looked at the message. THROW ME, it said. I looked across the room, past the laser sight sweeping the rug. Only a few yards away from Yuki's corpse was the door to the hallway.

I hurled the pager at the laser sight and leaped across the room just as the sniper fired. The door was unlocked. I hastily exited the room just as the sniper fired again, hitting the door.

It seemed I had a guardian angel looking out for me.

How had AllOfMP3.com come to this?

suddenly it hit me: where was the eunuch? suddenly i felt a huge hand grab the back of my neck, lifting me off the ground, high, but not in the way i was high on kedimine. i grabbed for my stiletto knife, but the hunchback had disarmed me. i was now at the mercy of the big ball-less freak, holding me in the stairwell of the oldest brothel in moscow.

More for a new day.

(Meanwhile, a roffle:

Margaret Seltzer's literary agent, Faye Bender, declined to comment.

"I'm so sorry, I can't be a part of it. I'm running out" the door, she said.

That is some of the weirdest quote placement I've ever seen.

Guys, you are basically writing this book:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/bestselling-sci-fi-fantasy-2007/2811-1.jpg

I should know, I just read it like three weeks ago. Can mail to most enthusiastic poster...?

Brent Ghelfi = clearly a made-up name.

how did i miss this??

It gets better:

Margaret B Jones Seltzer, the fake memoirist du jour, has included, in her stories of growing up in gangland, the fact that she's stayed involved with the community via a nonprofit called International Brother/SisterHood. The extent of that involvement -- and what that nonprofit is, exactly -- is unclear.

And to tie it back in to the thread topic:

Lying writer James Frey will be damned if he is going to miss an opportunity to milk literary deception for all it's worth, so he's already launched a new publicity campaign, less than 48 hours after newb lying writer Margaret Seltzer got the whole country talking about fake autobiographers again. Of course it's probably just a total coincidence that Frey chose now to launch the new blog where most of the text is copied from other sites, where Frey posts a purported lesbian fantasy video (so not worth it) and where he of course promotes his million-dollar-plus novel the name of which is not important.

Mongrels were so ahead of the curve on this trend.

Anyone going to pick up Bright Shiny Morning?

too many books around to waste time on this one

What he said.

I read My Friend Leonard so I guess I will read this, there is no saving face or time for me.

the vanity fair piece on him this month was pretty sympathetic and makes a pretty fair case that portraying the first book as a memoir was not his idea and was forced by the publishers. it was submitted to 18 publishing houses as fiction first and turned down by all of them.

this guy just seems like a d-bag, esp how he used the "memoir" to turn himself into a tough guy who survived the scourge of drugs (that shit is boring and sad when i hear about it in conversations/in ilx posts too)

james frey king of ilxors casually mentioning illicit activities

more like king of self-mythologizing ilxors, yes?

if you read that vanity fair article though--he was sort of pushed into calling it a memoir by his publisher. He first submitted the book as a novel. Yeah blah blah blah he's a douche, I kind of agree, but I'm glad he got the good review this morning in the NYT, maybe people can start to forget what a clusterfuck the who;e tjomg was.

During the publishing process, Frey, it seems, still had some misgivings about putting the book out there as a memoir. On an “author’s questionnaire,” a memo used for marketing and publicity that authors fill out a few months prior to publication, he wrote, “I think of this book more a work of art or literature than I do a work of memoir or autobiography.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/06/frey200806

and i haven't read any of his books nor do i want to--i just think dude got totally hosed.

I'm glad he got the good review this morning in the NYT

For a good review it kept making me think, "She doesn't like this book at all, does she?"

I thought that too. Maybe the idea of this guy's redemption was too good to let go.

He is a total d-bag but not just cause 'look at me I smoked crack.'

Well I am mainly judging him a D-bag going on his autobiographical portrayal in Leonard, however accurate that one was intended to be...

for all his whining that the publisher made him market it as a memoir the fictional elements are what changed a pitiful drug addict into the tragic tough guy - s douche move w/o the fake memoir scandal

btw im a big supporter of the fake memoir genre in general

i kind of want to read the "i was a refugee from a nazi camp and raised by wolves" one

My own memoir, Oing Oing: A Redemption Story, is selling briskly

He is a total d-bag but not just cause 'look at me I smoked crack.'

'look at me i smoked crack' totally should have been the title

For a good review it kept making me think, "She doesn't like this book at all, does she?"

Having never read anything of Frey's, it had me thinking, "Is Janet Maslin recovering from a stroke?"

Dictating, post-tracheotomy.

she's imitating Frey's style, guys. i've never read anything of Frey's and i figured it out too.

That much was obvious!

i'm with you Ned. when i first read it, i thought, Wow rave review. But now that i think about it, there's something weird about reviewing a book in the author's style. Michiko does it sometimes, too, but it's usually when she's panning something.

I mean, if she was trying to warm my heart to the style of the book, she not only didn't succeed, she made me barf.

i am sorry that you barfed. perhaps you should write a memoir about the time you read the NYT and barfed?

i am sorry that you barfed.

I am trying not to barf my heart

i cant make my barf turn into a heart oing oing oing

haha has max ever read almost transparent blue?

"Ken, he stabbed his brother, I think maybe it was his brother, but he didn't die, and he came to the bar a little while back."

I gazed through the wine glass at the light bulb. Inside the smooth glass sphere the filament was dark orange.

"He said he'd asked you about me, Lilly, so watch your mouth, OK? Don't tell too much to weird guys like that."

Lilly finished the wine that had been set down among the lipsticks and brushes and various bottles and boxes on the dressing table, then right there in front of me she slipped off her gold lamé slacks. The elastic left a line on her stomach. They said Lilly had done fashion modeling, once.

On the wall hung a framed photo of her in a fur coat. She told me it was chinchilla and cost I don't know how many thousands. One time, when it was cold, she'd come to my room, her face pale as a corpse; she'd shot up too much Philopon. With a rash around her mouth, shaking violently, she'd fallen in as soon as she'd opened the door.

The LA Times feels rather differently:

Frey seems to know little about Los Angeles and to have no interest in it as a real place where people wrestle with actual life. There are obligatory riffs on freeways and natural disasters and a chapter on visual artists that lists "the highest price ever paid for a piece of their work in a public auction." There are also occasional installments of "Fun Facts" about the city, as if to give the illusion of a certain depth. Did you know that it is "illegal to lick a toad within the city limits of Los Angeles"? Neither did I. But I also don't know what this has to do with the larger story of the novel, except as another example of L.A. as odd and quirky, a territory in which we all "live with Angels and chase their dreams."

Now, if this story about him being FORCED to push it as a memoir is true, I might have some more respect for this guy, but that would mean that he's approaching the zero point where he was prior to Oprah's big reveal.

The only thing I've heard is that, if you have any friends, many or few, who have let things get away from them at one point or another, or if you have, the book is tedious. So, no thank you.

As for yet another L.A. as "a place with real people, oh my god" book, get a fucking grip. L.A. is Detroit with a beach and mountains. That doesn't mean that I don't absolutely love it - I have grown to really like it here - but its a REAL city. Dirty as hell, crime - state sanctioned or otherwise, segregated but with the natural friction that comes with such a ridiculous diversity of people crammed into one place, all chasing their one, common god - loot.

This is not to say that I would be ambivalent about choosing Detroit or L.A. - fuck a Michigan winter.

I mean, if she was trying to warm my heart to the style of the book, she not only didn't succeed, she made me barf.

Yeah, I've never read Frey, but it's hard for me to believe that such a ridiculous prose style could yield a bestseller - so either Maslin's a poor imitator or Frey really is awful.

i could believe both

The goof in repose:

JAMES FREY was back in his old neighborhood, strolling happily along the Venice boardwalk, enjoying a sunny day in a T-shirt and aviator shades as he passed tattoo shops and a man who was selling what he claimed to be "philosophy." It doesn't get any better than this, Frey's body language seemed to say.

"This," Frey, 38, said. "This doesn't exist in New York. This weather -- it's like this in Venice all year. Never that hot here because of the ocean. I mean, dude, every day -- all year."

That's when he bumped into an old neighbor, who still lives across from the house where Frey wrote the 2003 book, "A Million Little Pieces."

"Jesus! I thought you won the Nobel Prize for literature!" shouted Marvin Klotz, a retired English professor, hanging out on a bench with some friends. He'd seen all the recent press. "Newsweek! Time! Vanity Fair!"

"Washington Post, I got a good one," said Frey, who talks through his nose with a bored-guy flatness.

Frey could have been just another local boy made good. Then Klotz, a dead ringer for Jerry Garcia and Albert Einstein, introduced the writer to another friend as "the disgraced James Frey!"

"The most notorious author in America," Frey offered, smiling his crooked smile.

They all cracked up, laughing in the seaside sun.

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2008/05/dept-of-that-ex.html#comments

DEPT. OF THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING
This morning I was watching James Frey (I know, it's a sickness, I don't know why I do this to myself) on Tagged, Barnes & Noble's "weekly video series about what's new in the world of books" and nearly spit up my coffee when he made this stunning revelation: He doesn't read his own work. Ever.

Host Molly Pesce was aking him about his process and he answered that he writes 9 to 5. "I think of what I do as a job. Just like anybody else goes to work. I do." (A regular lunch-bucket guy that James Frey.)

But the shocker came when Pesce asked if he ever looked at his work the next day and went "blech!" (An astute reader that Molly Pesce). Here's what Frey had to say:

I don't ever read what I write. You know. I don't read it while I'm writing. I don't read it when I'm done. I've never--except for public events--I've never read my first two books. I've never read that one. I never will. I don't have really any interest.

Just what we all wanted:

James Frey, the author of “A Million Little Pieces” and “Bright Shiny Morning,” is working with another writer and anonymously shopping a young adult novel called “I Am Number Four.”

A source familiar with the project said that Mr. Frey, who was famously caught embellishing details in “A Million Little Pieces,” his memoir of drug addiction and recovery, came up with the idea of what is proposed as a six book series and is working with another writer to pen the actual text.

R.I.P. Jaybob

Oh for the days of controversies this small