James Frey Speaks About New Novel and Breaking the Rules
The James Frey saga continues. After achieving bestsellerdom and celebrity with his "memoir," A Million Little Pieces, he was then ritually shamed on Oprah after he admitted that he made up a lot of the story. Now, Frey is back with a new novel, Bright Shiny Morning and he talking
to Vanity Fair in a lengthy and very interesting interview. Apparently, there was more to the Oprah/Nan Talese/Frey scandal than was reported at the time.
Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. 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! And tell us it's all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone's face. 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. He has been press shy since his January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and doesn't plan to speak to the press again after this interview.
"Frankly, I don't even care," he says, exasperated, after I pushed him on the subject of the scandal for the 16th time. "I don't care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what. I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It's just a book. It's just a story. It's just a book that was written with the intention to break a lot of rules in writing. I've broken a lot of rules in a lot of ways. So be it."
Well, that's not terribly apologetic, is it? Nan Talese has spoken out about how she says Oprah tricked her and James into coming onto the show. She says Oprah lied to them about what the show would be about, then attacked them on-air. Later, Talese said Oprah commented to them "it's just business, nothing personal." Oprah denies all of this. In any event, the interview is worth a read.
