more james frey

James Frey, asshole liar author, is on a different kind of rehab course — this time, he’s trying to rehab his image after being outed as a fraud whose “memoirs” are a tissue-thin (and abysmally written) pack of falsehoods.
He was on Larry King last night and spinning his talking points. I’m sure the PR consultants he has working for him are doing their best, but he’s still full of shit.
Frey: “I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has.”
Bullshit. If he hadn’t expected scrutiny, why did he go to the law-enforcement agencies that had arrested him and ask them to expunge the records, right when the book was hitting bookstore shelves? He very clearly knew the scrutiny was coming, and he tried to cover his ass.
Frey: “A memoir literally means my story, a memoir is a subjective retelling of events.”
Bullshit. Here’s where Frey is dangerous: He’s trying to conflate a subjective retelling of events with making shit up. Let’s say I had a birthday party when I was 12. Twenty years later, I might think back to that day and remember it differently than it really happened. Perhaps I’d forgotten key details and remember chocolate cake instead of coconut. Perhaps I’ll forget that little Suzie Jenkins was mean to me, or that I really wanted a G.I. Joe action figure but only got socks. That’s a subjective retelling of events — acknowledging that our memories might not be perfect, but trying our best to tell it like it was.
Inventing a three-month stint in jail — that’s not an accidental mistake. That’s making shit up.
(And, for the record, memoir literally means “memory,” not “my story.”)
Frey: “I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say I’ve conned anyone. The book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events is 18, which is less than five percent of the total book. You know, that falls comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir.”
Bullshit. Assuming for a moment his page counts are correct, the reason they’re the ones in dispute is because they’re the only ones that would have a paper trail to back them up. Did Frey really board a transatlantic flight high and soaking in his own blood, with a gory hole through his cheek? It sure seems doubtful that an airline would let such a character on, but there’s no way to check. He doesn’t say what airline it was, the number of the flight, or any of the other details that might let one confirm or refute his story. The only things that are checkable by publicly accessible records are his run-ins with law enforcement agencies, and it seems like he made up just about everything there.
As the Smoking Gun story points out, most of the juicy unbelievable stuff in the book happens only when he’s in the company of people who die during the book’s course. Were his stories about the addict Lilly correct? Did Lilly even exist? We’ll never know, because “Lilly” is dead.
One part of the Smoking Gun piece I found particularly damning is that Frey had clearly moved to a new level of coverup by convincing a professor friend to agree to be his emergency backup. This professor shows up as his felon-in-arms in Frey’s new book, and when the Smoking Gun started asking questions about the central arrest of the book, Frey suddenly remembered — contrary to even his book’s lies — that this professor buddy was in the car with him at the time and could vouch for him. That was before Frey knew TSG had a copy of the police report in question, which clearly said Frey was alone in the car. Suddenly the professor friend disappeared from the story.
Frey: “I mean, I’ve acknowledged that there were embellishments in the book, that I’ve changed things, that in certain cases things were toned up, in certain cases things were toned down, that names were changed, that identifying characteristics were changed.”
Bullshit. See, this is another part of the strategy: make it appear that the criticisms of the book are all about nitpicking things, like an incorrect name. It even makes him look like a hero — he was just changing someone’s name to protect them from prying eyes!
But again, he’s not accused of that. He’s accused of inventing his story wholecloth. He invents FBI investigations targeted on him, he invents brawls with police, he invents jail terms, he invents train wrecks that kill his friends. These are all made up. They are not toning things up or down.
Frey, on why he shopped the book to publishers as a novel: “I think of the book as working in sort of a tradition — a long tradition of what American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.”
Bullshit. Just because Jimmy Frey putting himself in the tradition of Hemingway and Fitzgerald is bullshit.
Frey, on why those heavyweights called their books novels instead of memoirs: “[A]t the time of their books being published, the genre of memoir didn’t exist. I mean, the genre of memoir is one that’s very new and the boundaries of it had not been established yet.”
Bullshit. Memoirs date back centuries. Hell, Ulysses S. Grant’s book — entitled “Memoirs,” published in 1885 — was one of the publishing phenomenons of the 19th century. Hemingway and Co. never wrote a truthful memoir and labeled it a novel. Their fiction has autobiographical elements, sure, but it’s tweaked to the needs of the story and labeled fiction.
Asshole. See, those of us in the business of writing facts hate guys like this. Every time someone like Frey comes along and says “Oh, I changed a little bit here and there, everybody does it,” it makes the rest of us look like Frey-level frauds. Once he gets exposed as a gutter rat, he tries to drag the rest of the profession down to his level. Well, there are plenty of people out there who manage to write nonfiction that isn’t based on lies, and Frey should be ashamed. His book would have gone nowhere as a novel — which is why 17 publishers rejected it as such and why 99.9% of the promotion at publication was on how this was A True Story.
Addendum: Seth Mnookin has a good take, based in part on his own rehab experiences. “[T]hese stock characters…are typical of the kind of cliché-ridden portraits that populate Frey’s book…If a novelist wrote a book run through with these kind of straight-from-Central-Casting chestnuts, he’d be politely told to try again…as Frey says he was, by 17 different publishers, before, Frey says, Doubleday’s Nan Talese said she’d publish his novel if he recast it as a memoir.” As I said earlier, I was amazed at how bad the writing is; it really reads like the third-best piece in an undistinguished high school literary magazine.