Giving James Frey a Second Chance
I fucking loved A Million Little Pieces. It was overwrought, bloated and hyper-sincere but it was also cool and dark and heartbreaking at times. Really, I just ate that shit up. There’s a great interview with him in Vanity Fair about the soap opera/reality TV show of his last few years. I’m totally buying his new book. I like liars. I like Norman Mailer. Check this:
Mailer stood and introduced himself: “So, you’re the guy that caused all these problems. I wish I’d known you at the time that the problems began. If you would have called me, I would have explained to you how to get through all this mess!” They sat down on the couch and talked about memoirs, a genre, Mailer said, that was by definition corrupt: “That’s why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self. Everything I’ve ever written is memoir, you know, is an inflated vision of the ideal Platonic self.”
An inflated vision. I am an inflated vision. It makes me want to write a memoir and make a ton of shit up go on Oprah and be humiliated. And, on the subject of Oprah, she does not come across well in this piece. At least from Frey’s perspective, which is suspect, but it doesn’t surprise me that she can be kind of a bitch. And that she was angry, not because she felt betrayed personally, but because she felt like Frey damaged her brand. I’m inferring most of that. Making shit up. Nothing on this website is true. Nothing.His new book, Bright Shiny Morning, may be forgettable but I think Frey isn’t forgettable. And is worth reading. From the Vanity Fair Piece:
Bright Shiny Morning is a sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams.
