Why does everyone hate james frey

I still believe him about that stuff. Well before Oprah anointed it, Millions was a book you either loved or you hated, with few people I know sitting in between. But one of the things that bothers me is that we all know people who struggle with addictions. Sometimes fatal. This is misleading to people trying to figure out how to deal with their own addiction problems. And lying for huge profit and gain. It primarily serves in the book to inflate him as a tough guy, not as an addict. This is big.

In both his books, Frey loves to play the tough guy, the proud bonehead bruiser. We should be less concerned with how recovering addicts are going to take the news that he lied — because he was still an addict, people! Think about it: These revelations fit in with the Frey we met in the book. The whole argument about the book as therapeutic aid feels to me like a smokescreen anyway. I mean, what are they saying? The voice is too aggressive and provocative.

This is a guy who wanted to be a famous writer. He gives us gang members, porn-industry types, Asian sex slaves, artists, art collectors, gossip bloggers. He gives us lists of real L. At times, the randomness feels distracting—you wish Frey could rein himself in and return to the central narratives. The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity.

But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment.

On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! The publishing world responded, pumping up both.

Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit. Now he would just as soon forget the whole mess. He fears and loathes the media. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. So be it. On a casual level this makes him endearing. I have two more meetings and I need you to go buy me some underwear and buy me some pants.

On a deeper level, breaking the rules has been part of a rich fantasy life for Frey. Since as early as he can remember, his heroes—whether literary, artistic, or fictional—were rebels. As a teenager growing up in Cleveland and suburban Michigan, the child of wealthy parents his father was a business executive at Whirlpool , he became enamored of the works of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski, three icons of male debauchery and bohemianism.

Frey romanticized their hard living and by about the age of 14 was drinking and smoking pot regularly. Eventually he was also doing crack, meth, and acid. It was not just the behavior described in those books that struck a chord with Frey; it was also their literary significance.

All three authors mingled fact and fiction, sometimes writing about themselves and their experiences, sometimes writing fantastic versions of themselves and their experiences. Frey produced his first piece of real writing in , after graduating from Denison College and post-rehab, when he was living in Chicago. Like many frustrated novelists, he decided to try screenwriting, and he moved to Los Angeles.

He initially tried to write smart screenplays. Frey tried his hand at directing—a small-budget film called Sugar: The Fall of the West, about a sex addict; it, too, was disappointing. Even though he was just starting out, it was hard for him to take the setbacks in stride.

His newfound sobriety was fragile, and he was determined to make something of his life. When not sweating it out in front of the computer, Frey lived up the rebel side, inviting both friends and homeless people to come over and watch boxing matches on TV and get wasted he stayed sober. In his spare time, he volunteered as a mentor. As is often the case with writers of best-forgotten movies, the assignments continued to come in.

It was time to return to his serious literary ambitions. He put the screenwriting aside, took out a second mortgage on his house, and threw himself into A Million Little Pieces, a book he had started a couple of years earlier, based on his addiction and recovery.

Friends and his girlfriend next door, Maya who would soon become his wife , thought he was nuts for blowing a perfectly fine career on something so indulgent. It came pouring out, and Frey easily found the rapid-paced, freewheeling style that would become his trademark—no quotation marks, no paragraph indentations, few commas, sentences that run on and on and go into the next.

He took pride in its stylistic unorthodoxy. Early on, he showed it to someone who had an M. The reaction was the same one Kerouac got after he gave his editor On the Road, one crazy-long paragraph written on a paper-towel-size scroll.

This would get destroyed in my workshop. He landed a hot one, Kassie Evashevski, then at Brillstein-Grey, who worked with both books and films. As he tells it today, Frey, continuing to follow in the footsteps of his literary heroes, sought to publish it as fiction.

I told her it was a novel. According to Frey, Evashevski sent the book out to 18 publishers, and no one wanted it. According to Evashevski, in discussions with these interested parties, she told them that the book, as she understood it, was actually true.

He showed it to his boss, the highly respected and upright Nan Talese wife of legendary journalist Gay , who, surprisingly, was deeply impressed by the immediacy of the book and thought it would be invaluable to anyone with an intimate connection to addiction.

Evashevski came back to Frey with the news. Frey recalls the conversation he had with her. They got to be close friends, talking on the phone daily, visiting each other on vacations, and going to boxing matches. During the publishing process, Frey, it seems, still had some misgivings about putting the book out there as a memoir. It made little difference. Ten thousand copies sold, 25, copies sold, 50, copies sold, 70, copies sold.

Frey, given his first taste of fame, played up his rebel soul for the media. Unnoticed under the din of all the turbo-charged, unflinching, badass excitement was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in which the reporter, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, raised questions about the plausibility of the book. Such a disclaimer might have provided for a certain amount of wiggle room, and might well have prevented Frey from getting into so much trouble.

Oprah had just selected A Million Little Pieces for her book club. Maya called Frey immediately. Published in , it is a memoir of the author's time as a year-old alcoholic drug addict and former criminal in a rehabilitation centre in the American midwest. Over the course of pages he wrestles a swarthy rage he names "the Fury", battens down his cravings, sprays spit and snot and blood and urine, recounts his misdemeanours, finds friendship, and falls in love. In one memorable scene he undergoes back-to-back root-canal surgery, but as he is in withdrawal he is forced to weather the entire procedure without anaesthetic, pressing his pain into two tennis balls until his fingernails crack.

It is a brutal, foul-mouthed, utterly compelling book. To begin with it sold fairly well, as did its sequel, My Friend Leonard, which recounted the now sober Frey's life after rehab and a jail sentence. In September , however, something unexpected happened: A Million Little Pieces was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club - making Frey the first living author to be chosen in more than three years. In a show christened The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake at Night, various tearful Oprah employees appeared to declare the book "revelatory" and an emotional Winfrey announced, "[It's] like nothing you've ever read before A Million Little Pieces proceeded to outsell any book ever featured on Oprah's book club, swiftly becoming the No 1 paperback non-fiction book on the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks, as well as the No 1 seller on Amazon, and was published in 22 languages worldwide.

You spotted its cover everywhere: on train journeys, on coffee tables, enjoying pride of place in the autobiography section of bookshops. There was applause from Bret Easton Ellis and Gus van Sant, and reviews that labelled the memoir "turbo-charged", "compulsive" and "unflinchingly honest".

Then in January of this year, something even more unexpected happened: the investigative Smoking Gun website claimed that A Million Little Pieces was far from honest. It asserted that a six-week investigation had cast doubt on some of the details in Frey's memoir, including his incarceration, the severity of his crimes, and his experiences in rehab.

It told how the site's reporters had contacted the police department in Licking County, Ohio, and questioned Sergeant Dave Dudgeon about Frey's arrest in October In the account of the incident in A Million Little Pieces, Frey, stacked to the rafters with crack and alcohol, hits a police officer with his car, reacts violently to arrest, is charged with assault with a deadly weapon among other things, and ends up sentenced to an day jail term.

Dudgeon revealed that, in fact, the author was issued with two traffic tickets, one for driving under the influence and one for driving without a licence, and received a misdemeanour criminal summons for having an open bottle of beer in his vehicle. As news of the Smoking Gun report ricocheted across the internet and out into the mainstream media, Frey responded on his blog: "So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt.

I stand by my book and my life. Oprah, too, initially stood by her man. To me, it seems to be much ado about nothing. Then, earlier this month, a tentative legal settlement was reached that required Frey and his American publisher, Doubleday, to provide refunds to readers who felt they were defrauded in buying a book classified as memoir.

Meanwhile, A Million Little Pieces is now published with "a note to the reader" included. In it, Frey apologises to any reader who has "been disappointed by my actions", and says: "My mistake, and it is one I deeply regret, is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.

We sit in a dimly lit corner of a Manhattan restaurant across the street from his apartment. It is the beginning of the lunchtime rush; shouts, shattering crockery, steaming plates of carbonara spill out of the kitchen. Frey is wary. He has not given any interviews since Oprah in January. Today he has brought his own dictaphone, and places it side by side with mine on the restaurant table, where they sit like an uneasy cruet set. Since the Smoking Gun report, it has been, he says slowly, a "very surreal six months, very strange.

Sometimes terrible, slightly overwhelming. It's been like living in a Camus book, or a Kafka book, or something. I never expected to be recognised on the street. I never expected to get that kind of coverage, good or bad. I never expected to sell as many books as I have. And it was just overwhelming.

What was hurled at Frey was a furious mass of both loathing and veneration. Even now, if you type his name into an internet search engine, he turns up both streams of vitriol from those who feel defrauded, and fervent defenders of his writing. Of the 5, letters sent to him, he says, only 50 have been hate mail.

People still stop him in the street. Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew.

It's weird when you become a transparent person. I don't do what I do to be famous. He may not have wanted the kind of fame that would cause him to be recognised on the street, but he undoubtedly desired notoriety.

I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or years.

I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want 50 bottles of it.