If Frey is torn up by guilt or confusion by his role in the largest literary scandal of the last decade, he's keeping it to himself. This may be partly because he is legally barred, because of a nondisclosure agreement with Random House that concluded a series of post-"Pieces" lawsuits, from discussing the book and its presentation to the public as a true story.

He can't discuss the way the five hours he once spent in police custody turned, in the book, into 87 days in jail, nor the fact that he was not part of a train crash he described that killed two girls, nor can he explain whether he really beat the life out of that priest, whom he wrote he met after nearly jumping into the Seine.

But L.A is a subject he's glad to focus on now. The city was a place where he was successful, free of addiction and where his life was relatively innocent. It was a state of grace between the early addiction and rehab years and the post-Oprah period. He was sad to leave, he said, when he and his wife headed to New York in 2002.

"Completely," he added as the SUV provided by his publisher cruised on the 10. "I mean, I met my wife here, I wrote my first book here, I bought my first house here, I lived here from 26 until I was 32, 33. Important years for me."

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."

But after the book's inaccuracies were exposed, Ms. Winfrey angrily grilled Mr. Frey on national television. He was apologetic and his publisher added a disclaimer to later editions of the book in which the author acknowledged embellishing his story.

Mr. Frey's memoir touched off a broader debate about the blurring of lines between works of fiction and nonfiction, particularly in the field of memoir-writing. It also called into question how much responsibility publishers have for assuring that their nonfiction titles are factually correct.

HarperCollins Publishers says that it will release Mr. Frey's "Bright Shiny Morning," a novel set in Southern California, in the summer of 2008 through its Harper imprint. "There will be a lively media response to the book, but we're publishing it because it is an extraordinary piece of work," said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of the Harper imprint. "He has a huge number of fans. They will come readily and eagerly to this novel, which is emotionally powerful."

Janice Erlbaum, whose memoir of her life as a homeless teen, Girlbomb, has just been published by Villard, says she had "an extensive legal review with the Random House legal department, but I don't think they followed up." "They asked me a lot of questions like, 'What were the dates that this happened?' They really wanted to know who was who. I don't think they did any independent verification, but they certainly did ask me about every person and every detail in the book."

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Cupcake Brown, whose A Piece of Cake, a memoir of substance abuse and gangbanging, is also new to stores, hired a private investigator to help get facts right. "I wanted to be as honest and truthful as possible and have as much factual background and backup and evidence as possible — way before Frey. Every memoirist should do that."

Jenny Frost, president of Crown, Brown's publisher, says Crown didn't fact-check Brown but says of life after Frey: "I would like to think that we've always been intelligent about our authors and good judges of character. Certainly, in Cupcake's case, that's how we feel." But, she adds, "we'll never be quite as innocent as we were before."

I-MADE-it-up memoirist James Frey's new megabucks book deal has exploded into a million little pieces. Frey had a deal with his current publisher, Penguin-owned imprint Riverhead, for two more books, which was inked just before it was scandalously revealed last month that Frey had fabricated much of his story. The reputed new seven-figure contract included Frey's "first" novel, a "multi-voiced, multi-threaded story of contemporary Los Angeles," slated for publication in fall 2007. But a publishing source told PAGE SIX's Jared Paul Stern that Riverhead decided the author was too much of a liability and has just nixed the deal after much discussion. "That is correct, and we have no comment," Frey's rep says. Earlier this month, Frey's literary agent Kassie Evashevski, who negotiated the deal, dropped him citing "broken trust." Meanwhile, Warner Bros. is re-evaluating its big screen adaptation of Frey's faux memoir A Million Little Pieces. But none of the negativity has had much impact on sales of the book, which recently hit the 3 million mark.

And yet, if one idea continues to resonate, it's that the scandal could have happened to anyone in the book business. "I think the James Frey embarrassment could have occurred any time in the last 900 years of publishing, because the industry is built on trust for a writer's integrity," said Harold M. Evans, former publisher of Random House.

Publishers and editors can be deceived because they do not have the resources to verify every single fact in a book, he added. "But I only have 80% sympathy for them, because we should also be sensitive to things that ring false. If an author makes an outlandish claim, somebody has to take the time to find out if it's really true." The incentive to do that may be diminished with a writer like Frey, whose dramatic, redemption-themed memoir, suggests author David Halberstam, "is precisely the kind of book that many publishers are hungry for now."

"With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist," Halberstam said.

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"He seemed like the nicest guy I ever met in my life," recalled David Glasser, the international distributor of "Crash," who said he distributed a small movie Frey co-produced 10 years ago, adding: "He's probably ruined in Hollywood. Everybody knows everybody."

A Million Little Pieces publisher Doubleday, still smarting from its initial defense of Frey's best-selling book, is running an advertisement in today's USA TODAY apologizing to readers. And Riverhead, the publisher of Pieces sequel My Friend Leonard, is trying to distance itself from Frey. Riverhead is reconsidering a contract with Frey for future books and is referring inquiries about the authenticity of events in My Friend Leonard to the author.

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This month, Riverhead announced it had contracted with Frey for two more books, the first of which was to be a novel. Now, [Marilyn] Ducksworth says, "the ground has shifted. It's under discussion." Stephen Sheppard, a New York attorney who regularly deals with book contracts, says that all contracts with authors "contain provisions" and that publishers have "very extensive discretion in what they want to accept."

Meanwhile, Doubleday is attempting to "bear responsibility" for its culpability in the Million Little Pieces scandal. The ad in today's USA TODAY, which also will run in the Feb. 6 edition of Publishers Weekly, says that future book editions will have notes from the publisher and from Frey himself and that the jacket will indicate the change. Doubleday will not publish new copies until Frey submits his "author's note."

"He's currently working on it," Doubleday's David Drake says. "And we'd like to have it as soon as possible." Drake said Friday that the author's note would be published on the Random House website, randomhouse.com, as soon as Frey submits it. It had not been posted as of Sunday night.

The Whitbread’s top prize goes to one of the winners of prizes already awarded in five categories — novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children’s book. Each category winner receives $8,700, while Spurling receives the $43,000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Earlier bookmakers had touted short story writer Ali Smith as the likely winner, but in the end her book — The Accidental — and Tash Aw’s Malaysian-set saga — The Harmony Silk Factory — were not in the final three as judges continued their deliberations Tuesday.

In the end, Michael Murpurgo, chairman of the judges, said that Spurling beat off strong competition from poetry winner Christopher Logue’s Cold Calls, a modern reworking of Homer’s Iliad and Kate Thompson’s children’s book, The New Policeman.

"Somehow she managed to paint a picture of a painter that was accessible to people not necessarily familiar with art. It’s an extraordinary achievement to write a book of that length, which when you get to the end you are sorry it’s finished," Murpurgo said.

"Although some of the facts have been questioned … that underlying message of the redemption of James Frey still resonates with me, and I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read the book," Winfrey said in a surprise on-air call to CNN's "Larry King Live," on which Frey was a guest. "Whether car wheels rolled up on a curb...is irrelevant to me."

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"I am disappointed by this controversy," said Winfrey, who selected Frey's memoir for her readers' club in October. "I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work," Winfrey said in an apparent rebuke of how the book was marketed.

Frey, who is also a screenwriter, defended his work as a "truthful" but "subjective recollection of my life," and said the "essential truth" of the work should not be eroded by challenges to the veracity of some of the events he described. Frey said his embellishments, which he did not address directly, were far outweighed by the basic truth of his experiences.

Frey urged readers to look beyond the fabrications to what he said was an honest evocation of the anguish in an addict's life. But he acknowledged that the questions raised over his embellishments led to inevitable questions about the other more private events in a book set mainly during his time in rehab. "That's something I'm going to have to deal with," Frey said.

A film version of Frey's best-selling addiction memoir "A Million Little Pieces" could need a rehab of its own after a story posted Sunday on the muckraking Web site the Smoking Gun raised serious questions about the veracity of the author's gritty true-life account. On his Web site, Frey said, "I stand by my book and my life, and I won't dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response." He is scheduled to appear tonight on CNN's "Larry King Live" to discuss the controversy.

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As for the film adaptation of Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," one agent who requested anonymity said that the project will suffer because it no longer will be able to attract A-list talent. "I can't imagine that a star is going to want to do what in essence is a biopic of a guy whose biopic is incorrect," the agent said.

But a top literary manager, who also requested anonymity, said that people should concentrate on the writing rather than the story behind the writer. "With 'A Million Little Pieces,' part of what makes it great is this notion that it's a true story and that it's his memoir," the manager said. "And yet, if you were to strip that away, is it still a provocative and engaging and dramatic story? Well, I think it is, so I don't know if it hurts him." While the project might hit snags, it's uncertain whether Frey's burgeoning screenwriting career will take a hit. He is currently writing "Prep," a teen drama for MTV Films.

"No matter what happens, James is still a really good writer," said JC Spink, who is executive producing the film. "Besides, haven't most of us in this town been guilty of embellishing at one time or another? If anyone was going to hold that against me, I'd never work again."