No, Actually, James Frey Can Stay Fucked

until he tries, you know, actual contrition

go off queen

My first novel is coming out this October 7th. It’s about a young woman struggling with a psychotic disorder and the difficulty of building an ordinary life within one. I’m so incredibly excited to be able to share it with people. I hope to god it finds an audience. I have loved everything about working with Coffee House Press, exactly the kind of cool indie press I’ve always admired. But I do admit that it’s hard not to worry about getting your book out there to be read and reviewed and loved and hated. That’s all any of us wants, for our words to be read, and in an absurdly oversaturated publishing landscape, the big publishing houses still have a major advantage. Still and all, I’m thrilled to have Coffee House. I couldn’t have asked for more from them in this process.

I could have sold a book on similar themes to a big house for a lot of money - if I called it a memoir. I started hearing that within a month of my last big bipolar crisis and scandal in 2017, that I should write a mental illness memoir, that I have to write one, that it’s the book I was born to write. People in publishing I knew told me that the freshness of the scandal was not a detriment but a benefit, that in fact a memoir explaining what had happened might be the only kind of book I could ever get published now…. In the first couple of years that followed, it was very hard not to try and capitalize on this opportunity; despite what some dogged people continue to say, I was ruined in just every possible way by that crisis, but especially financially, and when CUNY eventually fired me for reasons vague enough not to trigger an ADA lawsuit, I was totally bereft, desperate. But I still didn’t try to sell a memoir. You see, the thing about my bipolar disorder and the behaviors that it has inspired is that they are real. They are actual. The illness is real; the things that happened because of the illness occurred. And because they occurred, I can tell you with absolute certainty and pristine clarity that there is no memoir to write based on my story.

Because it’s boring. Because it’s not even really a story. Because most of it has been slowly drowning in hot apartments and then living under the warm blanket of lithium for day after fattening day. Because the inpatient facilities I’ve been in have occasionally been dark in deep ways but have also been quiet and slow places filled with basically competent staff and patients on highly sedating medications. Because with the exception of a few sad ugly incidents, occasionally violent but mostly just saying profoundly destructive things, nothing really has happened thanks to my bipolar disorder. Because the incidents that have been most destructive for my life have taken place within a cellphone. Because I’ve never been a monster; I’ve just been rendered a sad sick man with a sad sick life. And I have never and will never fully dig out of the consequences of all of it.

What would the memoir look like?

Today, I grew slightly more manic. I think my friends are abandoning me.

Today, I grew slightly more manic. I can’t stop imagining people emerging from the sewer grates and dragging me down there.

Today, I grew slightly more manic. I wrote 44,000 words this week. They cut off the cable, not because I couldn’t afford to pay the bill but because I just didn’t.

Today, I grew slightly more manic. I’m sure of it - my friends are abandoning me, and their planning it all together.

Today, I grew slightly more manic. I am down to 183 pounds, from a high of 237 pounds.

Today, I grew slightly more manic. I think my ex-girlfriend, who I have not seen in two years, is hacking into my emails.

Today, I am very very manic. Friends keep commenting on the prominence of my collar bone. I have not showered or eaten in days because I am too busy writing.

Today I reached the pinnacle of another manic crisis. I threatened to kill that ex-girlfriend and her parents called the cops. My brother keeps calling me over and over so he can come rescue me. Soon I will go inpatient again.

I am inpatient. It is very boring here but the doctors are nice. I do not like trying to spread frozen cream cheese onto a stale bagel, but I do like the Jell-O.

Now I am on meds again. I take my lithium and Seroquel. I get a little fatter.

I take my lithium and Seroquel. I get a little fatter.

I take my lithium and Seroquel. I get a little fatter….

I suppose you can find a certain verve in that. But trust me, the 400 page version would not interest anyone and would certainly not get published by a publishing house and if it did it would not earn out its advance. It wouldn’t deserve to.

And I’m afraid I couldn’t bring myself to tell any dramatic lies. I wouldn’t make shit up because I won’t lie and call it the truth, not the “essential truth” or the “emotional truth” or the “artistic truth.” If I write a book and say that the events in it really happened, and they didn’t, that’s no kind of truth, it’s just a lie. Beyond that, though, I wouldn’t write a memoir - and take part in the fabrication that would be necessary for it to get published and sell - because, one, I won’t pimp my old pain out like that, won’t instrumentalize all the people I hurt along the way, won’t panhandle off of the spectacle of my truly awful behavior. And two, because our public perception of mental illness is so deeply fucked up, so fundamentally false, because publishing companies and movie studios and TV producers will only tell the most tawdry, sensationalistic, inspiring, and utterly horseshit stories about insanity. That’s a massive impediment to real people getting well, that they have to swim around in a culture with an impression of severe mental illness that’s existentially untrue. Real, ordinary patients live real, ordinary lives, the only story Hollywood or the publishing companies will show them is Big Chief throwing a control panel through the window, and they suffer. I will not participate in that.

Even if every word of a memoir I wrote was factually true, the book would feel like a lie to me, because it would be based on a dishonest premise: that severe mental illness is cool, exciting, dramatic, artistic, exciting. That shit’s not true. Actual severe mental illness is ugly, boring, pathetic, rote, grinding, slow, the absolute opposite of cinematic, and most of all, uneventful. The only good mental illness memoirs are the ones like Girl, Interrupted, where nothing really happens. And I don’t have Susannah Kaysen’s talent for representing the inner world of my psychology. Besides, t’s not just that I won’t write a memoir because I refuse to make up events that didn’t happen. I’m not willing to write a mental illness memoir because I won’t participate in the ugly farce of pretending that being sick is artistic, that behaving pathologically is romantic, that living in delusion is romantic. In other words, I won’t act the way that James Frey repeatedly did.

Yes, James Frey, understandably-disgraced author of bullshit fabulist narrative A Million Little Pieces, who wrote an absurd and contrived story of addiction that contained many blatant falsehoods, was eventually found out, and experienced disgrace of a type I know something about. For some reason, the New York Times has published this absurd, lie-laundering puff piece about Frey that bends over so far backward to exonerate him, I have to imagine that author Sam Dolnick could smell his own asshole. (Being that he works for the New York Times, I’m sure he loves the odor.) Please, observe this absolute master class in failing to understand basic morality, in the form of endless attempts to justify Frey’s lies.

Today, lies are told with gusto, while facts are distorted and erased at the speed of tapping thumbs. Just scroll on X for a bit, and the Frey affair might look like a horse and buggy that was ticketed for trotting too fast.

That is not how morality works.

As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.

That is not how morality works.

He’s hoping that his past fabrications, seen in the contemporary glare of the iPhone light, might not look quite as offensive as they once did. After all, the public has lately reconsidered former outcasts for far worse.

That is not how morality works.

Even the central players in the Frey affair see it differently now. William Bastone is the editor of The Smoking Gun, the outlet that unraveled Frey’s account by publishing police reports that showed his criminal run-ins to be less dramatic than he had claimed, among other embellishments. It was the biggest story The Smoking Gun ever published, before or since. But when Bastone tried to imagine the story breaking today, he sighed.

“The ability to shock and dismay people based on a story unearthing lies? I don’t think it would have anywhere near the effect nowadays,” he said.

Cool! What does that have to do with the morality of the scenario here, where Frey repeatedly and explicitly insisted that the stories in his memoir were true, right up until their dishonesty was made too obvious to ignore?

He calls it “the tsunami.” Reporters sneaked into his apartment building to knock on his door. Paparazzi took pictures of his wife and baby. Every outlet imaginable published stories delighting in the self-professed bad boy’s fall from literary stardom. (The Times published dozens of articles about the scandal.)

Yeah, that’s too bad. What does that have to do with the basic factual question of whether he was telling the truth or the basic moral question of whether he should feel guilty about lying? Because your story makes clear that he doesn’t feel guilty at all! Indeed, it’s eminently clear that he thinks he’s the aggrieved party. I want to be real clear here: I am someone who believes in redemption, and not just because I have to, although it’s true that I do have to. I don’t begrudge Frey getting published again, as he already has repeatedly. I don’t even begrudge him for a sunny blowjob of a story in the paper of record. The problem I have, first, is with these shameless attempts to retcon the concept of truth and falsehood to justify Frey’s past behavior, and more importantly, Frey’s utter lack of contrition, of remorse. I kept waiting for some paragraph where Dolnick is like, “Frey of course understands that what he did is wrong, and shows genuine remorse in saying….” Something like that. Anything like that! It’s not in there. Frey is clearly utterly unrepentant. And that is another difference between us. While there are still those who insist I’ve never apologized for the ugly shit I’ve done, I have apologized many times and will do so again. I did some real vicious shit, and that some people consider it unforgivable, I understand. I am terribly ashamed of my behavior and I wish desperately I could go back and change it. But I can’t, so all I can do is tell you that I know that I did something awful, express remorse, and ask forgiveness. Twenty years later, Frey betrays no contrition at all.

Twenty years later, Frey sees himself as a maverick and dismisses the controversy with a string of expletives. “We’ve all been told to be polite, to be good little boys, to go to college and follow the rules,” Frey told me from his extra-large mohair Eames chair, which he had custom-made so that he could sit in lotus pose. “Not me.”

Damn, what a badass! You’re not a pussy like the rest of those writers! You’re tough and cool. Quick question James: what does that have to do with whether or not you told lies?

It’s worth interjecting here and saying - even totally divorced from the question of its factual accuracy, A Million Little Pieces is an awful, sophomoric book. Frey has always dined out on the idea that the scandal distracted from the absorbing genius of his prose; unfortunately for him, the prose is that of a guy who shows up at an MFA program resentful that his peers get a chance to speak during workshop and convinced that he’s more of a “true writer” because his characters say “fuck” a lot. Frey’s initial waves in the literary scene stemmed from his embarrassing tough guy affect, his explicit insistence that writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Franzen were too effeminate and that he was going to bring swaggering machismo back to writing; this would be sad enough even if he really was that guy, and becomes sadder still when you watch him on video. I’ve not read his last comeback novel Katerina, and I’m unlikely to read this new attempt, not just because I don’t want to put money in the palm of a charlatan but because James Frey is a shitty writer. And a dime-a-dozen type, too, the he-man alpha who will restore masculinity to literature despite not exactly projecting masculinity themselves. Overcompensating dudes stumble out into the Brooklyn literary scene snarling and puffed up, flinging shit at more successful authors, insisting that only they write strong, hard, throbbing, veiny, engorged prose the way the old masters did, and not only are their personas always tired, their work is awful. A Million Little Pieces reads like a guy trying to fuck with a flaccid dick.

Dolnick says Frey fancies himself “an artist who belongs on the shelf alongside literary outlaws like Hemingway and Mailer.” This is interesting along a variety of axes - Mailer is rapidly disappearing from the canon because his work just wasn’t very good, and Hemingway’s best work was that which was least stereotypical, that is, least cartoonishly masculine - but perhaps the most important thing to say is that neither Mailer or Hemingway was ever actually an outlaw and its exactly that kind of misapprehension of basic literary history that outs Frey as a phony.

He believes that “A Million Little Pieces” reflected his personal experiences while speaking to deeper truths, as art seeks to do. When the facts were pedestrian, he improved them — the truth, but better.

“When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it’s not photorealist, is it invalid?” he asked. “When Rembrandt painted self-portraits, is he allowed to manipulate the paint to make himself look however he wants himself to look?”

One might note that you are neither Picasso nor Rembrandt, but that’s immaterial, because again - that is not how morality works.

“Did I fundamentally change publishing and literature?” he asked me, his eyes locked onto mine. “It’s a yes or no question. You’re asking me a bunch. I’m asking you one.”

I fumbled my words, but he didn’t hesitate: He helped uncork a publishing boom in memoirs, he said. And after that came autofiction, a genre where authors use their own lives, and often their own names, as grist. “I was working in autofiction before that word existed,” he said.

I’m sorry but… lol.

“It doesn’t matter what I do, people are going to find some reason to come for me,” he said.

People come for me a lot, too. Sometimes the way they come for me is fair; often enough it isn’t. And when it’s the latter I say so. But that they come for me is a consequence of my own bad behavior. I made the messes, albeit when I was working at diminished capacity. I have had to clean them up. And as much as I resent the way people still endlessly lie about me and what happened, I know that for all the negative attention I have no one to blame but myself. Do I think that the reviews for my novel will be influenced by people’s preexisting feelings towards me, should it be reviewed at all? Yeah, I suspect they might. I hope the critics will rise above that. But I will have no one to blame but myself if they don’t.

If Frey has found some perspective, that doesn’t mean he’s at peace. He contains a simmering anger that’s only partially submerged. In his writing and his therapy, he calls it “the Fury” with a capital F. During our time together, I caught glimpses of it.

As he showed me around his house, we walked past a punching bag hanging in the basement. In mid-stride, he flicked it with his fist, hard.

I’m sorry, but I can’t. I fucking can’t even.

“It’s the brutal hypocrisy of it,” he told me, his voice rising. “[Oprah] told more lies to the public times a thousand than I ever have. And I’ll leave it at that.”

James, honey… this is not how morality works.

Matt Starr, one of Dream Baby’s founders, has become friends with Frey and shrugged off Frey’s controversy as a weird, and kind of boring, blip. He noted that in contemporary America, both online and offline, crazier stuff is always happening. “When you hear an artist embellished some stuff, I’m just like, Ummm, OK?” he said.

Well. You get the idea.

The truth of the matter is that memoir has replaced the novel in some very deep and wide-ranging ways. People now turn to memoir to get some of the stuff they once turned to novelists to find. That Frey is no doubt correct that many memoirists embellish their stories does not, of course, change his own relationship to the truth, to his responsibility towards the truth. There is an awful lot one can say about an era in which wink-and-nod “nonfiction” has become more totemic than honest fiction, though. Mostly this plays out financially. A Million Little Pieces sold so well initially because of the notoriety imparted by its fake stories, lurid tales about flying on a commercial flight with a literal hole in your cheek, stuff like that. Then it continued to sell well because everyone likes to gawk at a car wreck. Will they buy Frey’s new novel Next to Heaven? I doubt it, but who knows. I would love to say that if they don’t, it’s because the book is bad, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. Great books don’t sell and bad books do. Happens all the time. Media goes a long way. Which is why I feel the need to shake my head so deeply at the decision of the Times to publish this, and at Sam Dolnick, “a winner of the George Polk Award for Justice Reporting.”

Not that long ago I was speaking to somebody with the power to buy books at one of the Big Five publishing houses, now retired. They told me, flat out, that they thought that now that I had published a few books and gotten reestablished and been published by fancy places again, they could secure a $500,000 advance for a memoir. My second nonfiction book only got half that. Casual conversation, didn’t mean much, but for the record that’s not out of keeping with what I’ve been hearing from people for years. Well, now I’ve preempted the memoir with the novel that will have to do in fiction what a memoir could not possibly do with fact, a novel for which I will receive a $3,500 advance. That’s the delta between the bullshit memoir I could write and the novel I did write, the difference between a half million dollar advance and a $3,500 one, between being the beneficiary of the giant publicity machine at a big house and a dedicated but tiny team at a little press trying to use asymmetric marketing warfare to get my book an audience. It could very likely be the difference between a spot on the best sellers list and awards and years on the paid speaking circuit and all manner of other trappings of success. But it’s OK. I knew all of that going into this; that’s the decision I made. At that price I choose integrity.

One of the most gobsmackingly oblivious passages in a piece that’s ludicrously lacking in self awareness in general runs

Frey lives in a modern home nestled in the woods of New Canaan, a town where his neighbor Paul Simon sold his mansion to Richard Gere (who apparently sold it again to developers). He has two bulldogs, Frances and Ruth, and art on his walls that seems plucked from a museum — drawings by Picasso, Matisse and Francis Bacon, a few Andy Warhols, a Rashid Johnson painting, Matthew Barney photographs.

Well, I can’t afford to live in New Canaan and there are no Matisses on my wall. I don’t have the advantage of lying myself onto the bestseller list. If you’d like to register a protest against the NYT publishing a puff piece about a serial liar given to incredibly embarrassing tough guy posturing, there are worse ways than preordering my novel. Nothing in it ever really happened, and yet it is true.

Frey has a history of getting aggressive with people who criticize him, but don’t worry about me. I am a large and angry man, and I have been in very dark places.