James Frey Lets It Rip

James Frey has lived in New Canaan for more than a decade, and in this house for about half that time, since the split from his wife of 20 years. The black exterior is in contrast with the floor-to-ceiling white inside. When I comment on the paint’s unusual texture (following Frey’s lead, I had removed my shoes and socks during our trek through the tall grass toward the pond in his backyard), he explains that this is what they use on the tops of skyscrapers. He believes it’s the only material that adequately reflects the sunlight that pours in through giant windows. His collection of art is expensive, abundant, indisputably cohesive. Almost as soon as we’ve finished discussing the real Samothrace’s prime placement in Paris—we are, ultimately, four people who can picture the Louvre—Frey is posing for photos in the nook of his living room where he writes, in the weeds outside his bedroom window, on rocks that jut from a creek near a friendly bobcat’s lair, face stoic, one or both of his middle fingers raised.This is early May. Almost exactly 22 years prior, Frey’s first book, A Million Little Pieces, was published to mixed, sometimes tortured reviews but achieved, over the next two-and-a-half years, supernova commercial success. If Frey’s name sparks even the vaguest jolt of recognition, you also likely remember the controversy over the revelation that parts of Pieces had been exaggerated, or fabricated entirely. The book was marketed as a memoir, and Frey had defended it in public as such. Oprah at first lavished him with praise, then later brought him on her show to excoriate him.Since the scandal began in earnest in 2005, Frey, now 55, has given vanishingly few interviews—even when he published Katerina, his first full, literary novel in a decade, in 2018. But he’s evidently reconsidered this approach. In the leadup to the publication of Next To Heaven, his pulpy new murder mystery about an upper-crust town not unlike New Canaan, he’s hired a renowned publicist; when I visit him, he’s in the middle of the long process of sitting for a New York Times profile. At one point, he requests that we go off the record so he can explicate why, exactly, he’s opening himself to this media attention and scrutiny. But what he tells me when my recorder is off is virtually identical to something he says when it’s switched back on: “I want my title back.”

To Frey, that title includes—but is certainly not limited to—a quote from Time that he’s chosen to include on the Next To Heaven jacket which calls him “America’s most notorious author.” He alludes to objective “data” (read: book sales) that underlines his importance to the industry, but also stylistic influence micro and macro (his idiosyncratic punctuation and formatting and the birth of autofiction, respectively). More than that, he sees himself in a lineage of great literary men: Mailer, Wolfe, Thompson, Vonnegut, Roth. Many of whom, he notes, were misunderstood or outright hated in their times.

Two Warhols, a “baby Rodin,” a drawing from Picasso’s blue period. The border between Frey’s house and the wildlife outside feels porous by design; he breezes from one room to another, chewing Nicorette gum and speaking expansively about the array of cultural objects he’s assembled. When we finally sit down, I ask him how much of the combative posture he took in his early interviews—and the supreme confidence he professes today—was, and is, a performance, and how much is sincere. He pauses for a long while. “It’s a bit of both,” he says.

I’ve always found questions as to what specifically Frey distorted or invented in A Million Little Pieces to be, basically, uninteresting. Of course the dimensions of his criminality have been stretched out like taffy; of course the exchanges aren’t going to be verbatim, even in the instances where the characters Frey encounters exist in real life as written. I don’t mean this as a moral defense, insofar as lying about your past in a book is immoral, nor would I echo the now-common refrain from his fans that culture has drifted in such a direction that brazen lying is unremarkable. Their point is well taken, but Pieces was released when it was released. It sold so fantastically in large part because people—whether gawking or feeling validated in their experience of addiction—believed it was true.

Frey claims that he and his agent pitched the book to Random House as a novel and, when the publisher noted that they retained the right to market it as a memoir, asked to remove from the contract a clause that would require him to attest to the veracity of what was written. “I made no claims of truth,” he says. “It was a novel; they bought it. A couple months later they were like, ‘This will sell better as a memoir.’ I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck. It’s a book.’” Furthermore, he says, it was that house’s editors who suggested many of the embellishments, and its publicists who suggested he “do what everyone else does” and stand by the book-as-memoir story when it was called into question. (Frey says that Pieces is the last time he has made any changes save for copyedits to any of his first drafts.) But he did take that advice, standing by the claims in the book until it was impossible to do so any longer. There is some personal agency and there are what we might euphemistically call market forces.

So there’s a degree to which the scandal is a product and symptom of its time, an indicator of where publishing was headed and the last gasp for a certain type of handwringing over what the consequences are, or should be, of lying to the public. If you watch Frey’s January 2006 appearance on Oprah today, it’s just sordid from every angle. Frey looks nervous, overwhelmed—there’s no suggestion of this as performance art, or even a principled argument in the name of literary license. Oprah’s indignation, in turn, is immense. In 2012, in an interview for a TV Guide feature about the 25 greatest moments from the show, she expressed some regret about the episode: “Over the years I’ve always tried to maintain a position of non-judgment and way... to see that person as a human being. And I did not do that with James Frey.” While recounting the ordeal for me in his New Canaan basement, between a dangling heavy bag and a room filled with boxes of books, notes, and memorabilia, Frey puts a finer point on it: “One of us apologized and it wasn’t me.”

Pieces continued to sell, even as Random House offered refunds to readers who claimed they were duped by the marketing. Frey became something like a pariah in the literary world. And so he sought advice. “What Norman Mailer said to me was, ‘You know the process of what happened here.’” Frey recalls. “‘They fucking hated Hemingway his whole life—until at the very end of his career I showed up. Then they could hate me and love Hemingway. And everybody suddenly loved Hemingway.’ Then he pointed at me. ‘And you gave me the gift. They all love me now because they can fucking hate you.’”

Insistent as Mailer might have been that history would absolve him, the Oprah appearance and the exposé on The Smoking Gun that preceded it made it difficult to imagine in real time. He was also struck in this period by personal tragedy: In 2008, his son, Leo, died less than two weeks after being born from a rare spinal condition. (Frey says that the raised middle fingers are a habit formed from being out in public with his three other children and hoping to stymie paparazzi.) A year later he published his third—and best—book, Bright Shiny Morning, which is presented as a compendium of character studies, profiles, and facts about Los Angeles, many of which telegraph the fact they’re invented. Beyond containing Frey’s sharpest prose and most propulsive storytelling, Morning is his final word on the concept of objective truth: that it is, essentially, beside the point.

Yet for most of the decade that followed, Frey disappeared into a series of commercial entanglements which sound, on the whole, extremely lucrative and reasonably dull. He founded a young adult publishing company called Full Force Five which churned out books optimized to be optioned for film and television. (Before Pieces, Frey worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and one-time director; in the late 2010s he developed Queen & Slim with Lena Waithe. In his basement is a box of correspondence with and notes for the director Tony Scott, who at one point in the 2000s hired him to write a screenplay about the Hells Angels.) He later helped run a global influencer network and an esports company. “I was making commerce, not art,” he says of Full Force Five specifically, before adding: “And it was fun!” But in Katerina, the protagonist, a writer named Jay, is bored to the point of existential crisis by a similar gig.

That laundering of autobiography through fiction—and the way that pursuit is received by critics and readers—is the clearest lens through which one can view Frey’s career. A decade after Pieces was released, autofiction, a genre of novels that are not only about writers-as-themselves, but reflexively about the act of writing, had become one of the dominant modes of English-language literary writing. To an extent, this a question of categorization: For as long as there have been books, people have been writing about themselves with various degrees of transparency. But when you move past the public shaming (that now seems quaint) and unapologetically audacious persona (which is back in vogue), Frey seems like a progenitor of autofiction on a more micro, stylistic level—his spare prose, his short paragraphs, the capitalization of improper nouns that are either important or having their Importance punctured.

It’s unsurprising that Frey, who grew up in Cleveland idolizing boxers like Marvelous Marvin Hagler (“I always wanted what they said about him: the best and the baddest”), draws parallels between himself and fighters. When he writes—on an Eames chair custom-built to be wide enough to accommodate a cross-legged posture—he blares music and puts his feet up on a wall that includes images meant to inspire him: quotes from critics, pictures of heroes, aphorisms, a rewards chart. The collage is impermanent and changes for each writing project, which Frey treats with a sort of no-bullshit industriousness that he hopes will serve as an incubator for the kinds of inspiration which are more difficult to schedule. When he starts a book, he works seven days a week, usually for around 12 hours a day, writing linearly until he’s finished.

It’s a punishing process that he hopes will be mirrored in his prose. So it makes intuitive sense that Frey initially intended to follow Katerina with the sort of ambitious book that could not only redefine his career, but help diagnose the world at present. It was called FourSeventySeven—as in the year Rome finally fell—about what he calls “the ongoing collapse of the United States.” “I went after everybody,” he says. “I went after the right. I went after the left. And I basically said none of you are righteous.” Frey’s agent read about 250 pages and called his client. “Man, when you wrote [2011’s The Final Testament of the Holy Bible] I told you I thought you’d get shot,’” Frey recalls him saying. “‘If you release this book, you’re dead.’”

Rather than court that controversy, Frey pivoted. An offer to adapt Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives for the screen was scuttled (“I wanted to do a much more racy adaptation than they wanted me to”), but started him on a kick of other Collins novels and books in their ilk: Danielle Steel, et cetera. The result is the brisk Next To Heaven which, though it functions as a satire of the ultra-wealthy milieu which Frey now inhabits, has far more modest ambitions than FourSeventySeven. “It was maybe less ambitious and more just, ‘Let it rip,’” he says: “Be funny, be dirty. I don’t think in the times we’re living in people have the attention span to read long things. I wanted to write a book that would be fun.” At times, it is; its epilogue, which whittles down the lives of characters to Freyish near-bullet points, is also oddly moving in its brevity, as if the rote facts of a person’s biography contain within them the sum total of their being.

Rain approaches. Frey has to be somewhere with his kids. “Stay as long as you want,” he says, swinging open the door to an overstuffed refrigerator. Adam and his assistant had already left, the ride back to the city is likely to take almost two hours, and the car I called won’t be here for 30 minutes; I have no choice but gratitude. How will I lock up, I ask. He scoffs: “I never do.” He leaves. I don’t exactly snoop, but I do try to take in the house as best I can; of course I sit in the Eames chair, of course the endless white feels, almost immediately, like a void. I take more notes. When I finally step outside, I walk past his garage, and through the lone window see what appears to be a vintage Porsche. I try to snap a photo so I can study it more closely when I have time. But later, in the back of my car, I open my phone and see that the only thing visible in the photograph is my reflection.

Paul Thompson was born in Winnipeg and raised in Minneapolis. His criticism, essays, and profiles have appeared in GQ, Pitchfork, New York, Playboy, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, among other publications; his fiction has appeared in Hobart. Since 2013 he has lived in Los Angeles, where he is currently the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the founder of Spider, a forthcoming magazine for the web.