How old is james frey

For me it was almost the opposite, y'know - non-fiction is much more popular now. Certainly that standard wasn't then applied to it later. Nan Talese, editor-in-chief of A Million Little Pieces and the senior vice president of Doubleday, told Oprah: "A memoir is different from an autobiography. A memoir is an author's remembrance of a certain period in his life.

Now, the responsibility, as far as I am concerned, is: does it strike me as valid? Does it strike me as authentic? I mean, I'm sent things all the time and I think they're not real. I don't think they're authentic.

I don't think they're good. I don't believe them. In this instance, I absolutely believed what I read. Our increased appetite for non-fiction is a crucial factor in both the inception of A Million Little Pieces and the subsequent persecution of James Frey - a persecution that seems particularly vicious when you consider that a man who is known to have manipulated the story of his own past is allowed to occupy the White House.

Arguably, our recent desire for facts is an indication that we are recoiling from a culture that has grown increasingly synthetic. Perhaps it's not entirely unconnected that, in a period of enormous political uncertainty, the bestselling publications at the newsagent are reality magazines, and that documentary films are shown at the multiplex and non-fiction flies off the shelves.

In this climate, the discovery that what appeared to be still-bloody fact was in truth a "manipulated text", as Frey terms it, proved deeply unsettling to many. Frey read the Smoking Gun report at the same time as everyone else.

Just surprised that the book would be put under that much scrutiny, and picked apart so thoroughly. Throughout this I've been surprised by the venom with which people have come after me.

I just never thought that I was that big a target. I never thought that I would garner that much attention, that I was that big a deal.

To many, Frey and his novel were a big deal. Not just because he sold millions of books and was wept over by Oprah Winfrey, but because his was a tale of triumph over adversity, and it gave people hope. Frey still insists that the bulk of his book is true. His addiction is unquestioned. The root-canal surgery, queried by dental experts, is "true to my memory My memory is still what I wrote. Take apart a lot of memoirs, he says, and you will find truth lying down with fiction.

Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature. I thought in doing that it was OK to take certain licences.

I think that if stories were told always exactly as they really happened most of them would be really boring. The real true story of Frey's fall from grace has, however, proved riveting to many. They have watched and waited for him to break. In an email, one journalist goaded him with: "Are you drinking again yet, asshole?

He has theories as to why: "America in a lot of ways is still a puritan society I think it has in certain ways to do with being a young culture, with being a culture that has less of an artistic and literary canon than some of the older European cultures. Even in this puritanical setting, when Frey's American publisher and agent dropped him, and Warner Brothers elected not to make the film of A Million Little Pieces, he was surprised.

My agent said her integrity was questioned, but it wasn't questioned enough for her to stop taking the money. Frey's former agent, Kassie Evashevski, has told Publishers Weekly that "it became impossible for me to maintain a relationship once the trust had been broken.

He eventually did apologise, but I felt for many reasons I had to let him go as a client. He did say he had changed the names and identifying characteristics of his fellow rehab patients, but, until recently, always maintained the veracity of his account Based on the information given us by the author, [editor] Sean McDonald and [publisher] Nan Talese believed in good faith they were buying a memoir, just as I believed I was selling them one.

Does he, one wonders, regret any of it? Whatever I have said I have said, whatever I have done, I have done. The fact remains, though, that whatever Frey says he has done, he has not necessarily done.

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Since as early as he can remember, his heroes—whether literary, artistic, or fictional—were rebels. As a teenager growing up in Cleveland and suburban Michigan, the child of wealthy parents his father was a business executive at Whirlpool , he became enamored of the works of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski, three icons of male debauchery and bohemianism.

Frey romanticized their hard living and by about the age of 14 was drinking and smoking pot regularly. Eventually he was also doing crack, meth, and acid. It was not just the behavior described in those books that struck a chord with Frey; it was also their literary significance. All three authors mingled fact and fiction, sometimes writing about themselves and their experiences, sometimes writing fantastic versions of themselves and their experiences.

Frey produced his first piece of real writing in , after graduating from Denison College and post-rehab, when he was living in Chicago. Like many frustrated novelists, he decided to try screenwriting, and he moved to Los Angeles. He initially tried to write smart screenplays. Frey tried his hand at directing—a small-budget film called Sugar: The Fall of the West, about a sex addict; it, too, was disappointing.

Even though he was just starting out, it was hard for him to take the setbacks in stride. His newfound sobriety was fragile, and he was determined to make something of his life.

When not sweating it out in front of the computer, Frey lived up the rebel side, inviting both friends and homeless people to come over and watch boxing matches on TV and get wasted he stayed sober. In his spare time, he volunteered as a mentor. As is often the case with writers of best-forgotten movies, the assignments continued to come in. It was time to return to his serious literary ambitions. He put the screenwriting aside, took out a second mortgage on his house, and threw himself into A Million Little Pieces, a book he had started a couple of years earlier, based on his addiction and recovery.

Friends and his girlfriend next door, Maya who would soon become his wife , thought he was nuts for blowing a perfectly fine career on something so indulgent. It came pouring out, and Frey easily found the rapid-paced, freewheeling style that would become his trademark—no quotation marks, no paragraph indentations, few commas, sentences that run on and on and go into the next.

He took pride in its stylistic unorthodoxy. Early on, he showed it to someone who had an M. The reaction was the same one Kerouac got after he gave his editor On the Road, one crazy-long paragraph written on a paper-towel-size scroll. This would get destroyed in my workshop.

He landed a hot one, Kassie Evashevski, then at Brillstein-Grey, who worked with both books and films. As he tells it today, Frey, continuing to follow in the footsteps of his literary heroes, sought to publish it as fiction. I told her it was a novel. According to Frey, Evashevski sent the book out to 18 publishers, and no one wanted it.

According to Evashevski, in discussions with these interested parties, she told them that the book, as she understood it, was actually true. He showed it to his boss, the highly respected and upright Nan Talese wife of legendary journalist Gay , who, surprisingly, was deeply impressed by the immediacy of the book and thought it would be invaluable to anyone with an intimate connection to addiction.

Evashevski came back to Frey with the news. Frey recalls the conversation he had with her. They got to be close friends, talking on the phone daily, visiting each other on vacations, and going to boxing matches. During the publishing process, Frey, it seems, still had some misgivings about putting the book out there as a memoir. It made little difference. Ten thousand copies sold, 25, copies sold, 50, copies sold, 70, copies sold.

Frey, given his first taste of fame, played up his rebel soul for the media. Unnoticed under the din of all the turbo-charged, unflinching, badass excitement was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in which the reporter, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, raised questions about the plausibility of the book. Such a disclaimer might have provided for a certain amount of wiggle room, and might well have prevented Frey from getting into so much trouble.

Oprah had just selected A Million Little Pieces for her book club. Maya called Frey immediately. He was ecstatic. All over the world people wanted it.

It would be published in 28 languages by 30 different publishers. Suddenly, Frey was less Jack Kerouac and more Dr. The Doubleday publicity-department phones were ringing off the hook with requests for interview upon interview upon interview. Frey and Doubleday had succeeded in giving the world an incredible literary experience.

Under the klieg lights of celebrity, he embraced the badass role he had written for himself. He now began standing by his book as straight nonfiction. You can go out to the yard and walk around or shoot hoops or lift weights. Frey, at last, was the rule breaker he had always dreamed of being. At this point, Frey sought psychiatric help. By December, just two months after his book was featured on Oprah, he had already started getting calls from the Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site that was looking for his mug shots.

When those proved elusive, the site started probing further into his life. By early January , the nightmare was growing. Shortly before, they sent Frey their findings. Over dinner, he showed the report to his friend the writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell and asked what he should do. Well, some were little—he never set a county record for blood-alcohol level, for instance.

But some were not so little. Not only had the three months of jail time never happened, neither had the crime that led to it: a brutal confrontation with Ohio cops that ended with Frey getting beaten with billy clubs. In addition, he had invented a role for himself in an actual train accident that led to the deaths of two high-school girls. The Smoking Gun story was beamed around the Internet and hit the mainstream.

At least he still had Oprah on his side.