Notes on Frey, being the Author’s attempt to defend a memoirist, authenticity in the age of made-up dialogue, God, cocky writers, and crestfallen critics, most likely disingenuous.
[Note: This essay was first published in Creative Nonfiction, then included in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1. It's reprinted here in slightly different form. It went through several revision passes and was to be included in How to Be Inappropriate, but we decided against it, since it wasn't, like, funny.]
How does one begin to defend James Frey, the infamous lying memoirist? By asking readers to imagine a future in which memoirists write and sign affidavits when they hand in their manuscripts? Who will check their facts? Will it be editorial assistants? Computer programs? Psychic profilers? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall Google the guards?
Still another question: Should we ask readers to ponder whether the James Frey Affair marks the end of a time when writers who wish to record how they perceive their own lives may do so, rather than stick to what is on public record? Judging by the media fallout and Oprah’s indignation, many would applaud such development. But there are other ways of looking at the Frey fallout. Thousands of psychotherapy patients await their treatment’s debunking; whole shelves of memoir, from Harriette Wilson to Primo Levi, wait for their warning stickers. The next Hunter S. Thompson, if there ever is one, should expect knocks on the door by the Authenticity Police, asking him if he really took that many tabs of acid that weekend in Vegas.
How does one begin to defend James Frey? I can’t. I can, however, try to tell you some stories, confess my own sins, and ask how others deal with theirs.
***
Here’s a story. On the afternoon of April 12, 2005, I spent an hour with James Frey at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday’s offices in the Saatchi & Saatchi Building on 375 Hudson Street.[1] That lower Manhattan building’s shiny postmodern curves show up in exterior shots on the sitcom Seinfeld to set up scenes at Elaine’s publishing office.
I was assigned to write a profile of the memoirist for Poets & Writers, a magazine that goes out to 60,000 aspiring creative writers nationwide. I had just read both of Frey’s books, 2003’s A Million Little Pieces and the soon-to-be-released sequel, 2005’s My Friend Leonard, in rapid succession. Along with review copies of those books, I held two tape recorders in my shoulder bag (one digital, one analog), pads of yellow legal paper, a box of black Uni-ball ultrafine pens, and a printout of my questions.
When I mention my Frey story to people, that I met him and all, many think it was after he was picked for Oprah Winfrey’s book club. People forget or don’t realize that A Million Little Pieces had a life of its own before then. His raw account of rehabilitation was, in fact, Amazon.com’s best-selling book of 2003 and a New York Times best seller, and had garnered a huge following. Frey got the one-two New York Times punch only big-time books get: a review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review and a “Books of the Times” article, in which Janet Maslin called attention to the fact that the book was sent around as fiction, then as a memoir.
Back then, however, I knew of Frey only from the now-infamous article by Joe Hagan for The New York Observer in February 2003, in which Frey talked shit about Dave Eggers’s 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. “[A] book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation,” he said. “Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody that says that. I don’t give a fuck what they think of me. I’m going to try to write the best book of my generation and I’m going to try to be the best writer.”
In “Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” Philip Lopate, perhaps our nation’s leading personal essayist, writes that to make an essay successful and interesting, “we need to dramatize ourselves” [italics his]; and, as part of that character-inventing process, we “maximize that pitiful set of quirks, those small differences that seem to set us apart from others, and project them theatrically, the way actors work with singularities in their physical appearances or voice textures.”
Frey certainly presented himself theatrically, both in his books and to the media. He seemed like a total badass. A famous image at that time was a black-and-white photo of Frey, with buzzed hair and shirtless, staring at the camera, crouched on a futon bed. One of his many tattoos is an inspirational acronym, FTBSITTTD (Fuck the bullshit it’s time to throw down).
1970.
1973. Black Gold? Really?
1976. Right On!
1977.
1977. Dumb Ditties.
1977, 1978. Music Machine
1978. Hot Ones radio commercial.
Pure Power.
1979. Star Flight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgZfH5xKWc4
1982. Christmas Album.
1983. Bird Dance album?
1984. Hit News.
Not a commercial, but some person showing off a Rock 80 8-track.
Again, not a commercial, but a slide show of someone’s collection. Superb.
And now, Miss Thang’s Thunder and Lightning,” response record to “The Rain” by Oran “Juice” Jones.
Ah, the days of hip hop response records. The Real Roxanne, sure. But how about Miss Thang? If you want to be my friend, you must know of, and know the rap at song’s end, of Oran “Juice” Jones’ “The Rain.” It’s on the first Def Jam’s Greatest Hits compilation.
There are YouTube clips of this song, as it turns out; which might have kept me from going on eBay and getting my own copy. I also got a 12-inch mix of “The Rain,” also on YouTube. Anyhoo, here’s my own mp3 rip of Miss Thang.
Miss Thang, “Thunder and Lightning”
Tan, rested, and probably baked: Lost photo from living in Ocean City, NJ, summer of 1988. I’m wearing the Wendy’s hat.
Over at NewPages, the guide to all things literary and presses and journalsy, Steve Caratzas takes a crack at reviewing HTBI.
I win over readers, Caratzas writes, “with a refreshing brand of archness that is never cloying and always very likable.”
This certainly brightened my day.
