Literary Rogues (28 page)

The first time I speak with Wurtzel on the phone for this book, she says something that still haunts me: “
Yesterday I was twenty
, today I'm forty-four, tomorrow I'll be dead.” She has a way of presenting the passing of time that would make Hemingway wet his pants.

When I meet her the next day at her SoHo apartment, however, she doesn't seem at all depressed. In fact, she appears to have found her way back to something resembling a normal, healthy life. She graduated law school in 2008, passed her bar exam in February 2010, and currently practices law and writes. She walks her dog and shops at Barneys, sometimes on the same trip—the clerks at Barneys love her dog, who is well behaved.

And she's finally found the source of her unhappiness. “
Kitten, I'm going to kill you
! You make my life a living hell,” Wurtzel yells at her cat, who has just toppled a stack of CDs to the ground and hidden under the bed. “No, that's not fair to say to her,” she adds. “She's a nice cat. But she's a difficult little thing.”

“
Writers used to be cool
. Now they're just sort of wimps.”

—
JAMES FREY

N
icholas Sparks, the former pharmaceutical sales rep who attained success writing bittersweet love stories like
The Notebook
and
A Walk to Remember
, follows a “grandmother rule” when it comes to his books. “
My grandmother's still alive
; she reads me, and if she would get mad at me, then I can't write it,” he told
Writer's Digest
.
James Frey
(b. 1969) has no such rule. In fact, you might say he writes with the intent to shock grandmothers everywhere.

“In literature,
you don't see many radical books
,” Frey once told a Canadian journalist. “That's what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions. I've already been cast out of ‘proper' American literary circles. I don't have to be a good boy anymore. I find that the older I get, the more radical my work becomes.” It should come as no surprise that Frey looks up to bad boy writers like Norman Mailer and Bret Easton Ellis. In fact, Frey says Mailer even told him, “
You're the next one of us
.”

Not that Frey has ever outright called himself a “bad boy.” “The only time I've ever said the phrase, ‘
I am a literary bad boy
,' is right now, when I just quoted it back to you,” he tells me. “I've never called myself that.” He doesn't have to. When the
Guardian
calls you “
the bad boy of American letters
,” what else is there to say, really?

Frey grew up in Cleveland and suburban Michigan reading the work of rebels such Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. After graduating from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in 1992, Frey moved to Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Like Elizabeth Wurtzel (and Thomas De Quincey et al.), he was a young, white, middle-class adult who seemed, to the outside observer, to have been born with every advantage in the world. There were some signs of trouble in Granville, such as a drunk-driving conviction, but Frey's parents could not have guessed that their son was hiding a habit the size of Utah.

Frey claims to have been an alcoholic since he was thirteen. As a teenager, he smoked pot, dropped acid, snorted meth. Then, in college, he began smoking crack. “
I realized that the books
I had read had left a lot of things out,” he wrote of his time as a drug user. “I was embarrassing and pathetic, unable to control myself or do anything productive with my life.”

His mother, Lynne Frey, backed up her son's shocking version of events that led to him getting clean in spring 1996. “
You go to the airport
to pick him up and he's covered with blood and his teeth are broken and he reeks of alcohol. I would hope no one would go through that again,” she told
CNN
's Larry King. “Then we took him to Hazelden [a posh rehab clinic in Minnesota]. That had to be one of the saddest days of my life.” After Frey sobered up, he moved to Los Angeles and found work as a screenwriter, before quitting to focus on writing a novel:
A Million Little Pieces
.

When Frey's novel landed on the desk of Doubleday publisher Nan A. Talese in 2003, the semi-autobiographical tale of drug addiction and rehabilitation had already been rejected by numerous publishing houses. Debut novels weren't selling at the time—the hot properties were memoirs, a category that Wurtzel's debut had jumpstarted in the previous decade. “
When I wrote
Prozac Nation
, the publisher wanted it to be disguised as a sociological story. There weren't many memoirs at the time; it wasn't a section at bookstores,” Wurtzel says. After
Prozac Nation
became a chart-topping bestseller, every publisher wanted in on the action. “Now you can't stop it,” Wurtzel says of the tsunami of memoirs flooding the marketplace. “By the time Jim Frey came along, he wanted to write a novel and no one would let him.”

At Talese's suggestion, Frey reworked
A Million Little Pieces
into a memoir with the help of his editor, Sean McDonald. Still, Frey seemed to be uncomfortable with calling the book “nonfiction.” He was no journalist. “
I think of this book more
a work of art or literature than I do a work of memoir or autobiography,” Frey wrote on an author's questionnaire for his publisher a few months before the book was published.

A Million Little Pieces
was a narrative tour de force, even if its structure differed little from the long history of drug memoirs that had preceded it. As Marcus Boon points out in
The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
, the basic structure of drug memoirs—pleasure, suffering, redemption, and loss—has changed little since De Quincey kick-started the genre in 1822. In interviews, Frey acted the part of the bad boy. He was dismissive of writers of his own generation he deemed unworthy, such as Dave Eggers (“
Fuck him
”). He went to boxing matches with his editor and seemed eager to mix it up with anyone willing to cross him (a tattoo on one of his arms reads
FTBSITTTD
, an acronym that stands for “Fuck The Bullshit, It's Time To Throw Down”).

Frey's quick ascension to literary superstardom culminated in his induction into the most exclusive group in publishing: Oprah's Book Club. Despite Frey's propensity to pepper his prose with more F-bombs per paragraph than any other best-selling book in history, Oprah's middle-American audience found his story of redemption charming. With Oprah's backing,
A Million Little Pieces
became the best-selling nonfiction title in 2005, spending fifteen weeks on top of the
New York Times
bestseller list.

Frey's reign as America's favorite ex-crackhead was short-lived. On January 8, 2006, TheSmokingGun.com posted an extensive takedown of Frey, titled “A Million Little Lies”:

In retrospect, it's mind-boggling that the revelations surprised anyone. Far from being an anomaly, James Frey was the latest in a long line of literary fabulists: Hunter S. Thompson made a career out of telling little white lies. Ernest Hemingway was known to tell fish stories bigger than his beer gut. As the high priest of realism, Gustave Flaubert, famously wrote, “
There is no truth
. There is only perception.”

In a 2006 interview with Larry King, Frey stood by his “
subjective retelling of events
. The book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events, mostly dealing with arrests and jail stints, is eighteen, which is less than five percent of the total book.” While the narrative embellishments heighten the bad-boy factor (the author's claim to have been “wanted by authorities in three states!” turned out to have been related to
“citations” and “traffic violations”
),
A Million Little Pieces
remains, at its core, a powerful story of addiction and recovery. “Nobody's disputing I was an addict or alcoholic,” he said. “Nobody's disputing that I spent a significant period of time in a treatment center.”

He phoned Bret Easton Ellis for advice. Ellis laughed. “
You have so far exceeded
any of the messes I made that I can no longer give you advice,” he told Frey.

Frey was lured back into Oprah's Chicago studio for an hour-long on-camera tongue-lashing, during which the Queen of All Media berated him for not being the hardened career criminal that his mythical jail time had made him seem. Nan Talese appeared on the show with Frey. “As an editor, do you ask someone, ‘
Are you really as bad as you are
?' ” Talese said.

Oprah: “Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you do. Yes.”

Shouldn't Oprah have been relieved to find out that Frey had never hit a police officer with his car, that he had never spent eighty-seven days in jail, that he had exaggerated his crack-addict lifestyle for dramatic effect? Shouldn't these, in fact, be good things to hear about your dear friend James Frey? Instead, the ethical dilemma, for Oprah and the millions of Frey's readers, became: Is it worse to break the law ... or lie about breaking the law?

The episode was one of the most watched in
Oprah
's twenty-five-year run. Comedian Stephen Colbert, addressing Frey during the fallout, said, “
If someday you choose
to write the story of your life, I recommend you choose to not have this happen.”

His literary agent left him. His editor, Sean McDonald, publicly distanced himself from the scandal, and the Penguin imprint Riverhead dropped Frey from a new two-book, seven-figure deal. Outraged readers brought a class-action lawsuit against Frey and his publisher, Random House, who settled for $2.35 million.

In an “apology letter” to readers, Frey admitted that he altered the way he portrayed himself in
A Million Little Pieces
to appear “
tougher and more daring
and more aggressive than in reality.” This “tougher” James Frey was one he created in his mind to help him get through the recovery process. Larry King worried aloud that Frey might be tempted to use drugs and alcohol again, or even take his own life. To make it through the post-Oprah fallout without relapsing, Frey would have to become that tough character for real.

In March, Frey escaped to the south of France, that home away from home where Lord Byron, the Lost Generation, and multitudes of other American and European writers have fled to in hopes of disappearing from the public eye and recharging their creative batteries.

“
The French revere people
who break rules and defy conventions, especially when the rules and conventions are ridiculous, as they often are in America,” Frey tells me. “Paris is the greatest literary city in the world. It has the richest, deepest literary history, the best bookshops, the best publishers, the best readers.” When Frey had first visited the city more than a decade earlier, he was not interested in simply walking in the footsteps of Hemingway or other ex-pats; he wanted to “follow the tradition, and continue, and further it.”

But he couldn't run forever. After just two months, Frey decided to face the music and return to New York.

Despite—or because of—the controversy, Frey's harrowing tale of addiction and recovery continued to inspire addicts facing the grim prospect of cleaning up their lives. (It has sold more than 5 million copies as of this writing.) Of the $2.35 million that Random House set aside to settle the class-action lawsuit over the book, only 1,729 readers came forward to claim a refund. Most readers, it seems, simply didn't care if parts of the story were embellished.

Oprah even called to apologize. “
It was a nice surprise
to hear from her, and I really appreciated the call and the sentiment,” Frey told
Vanity Fair
. “When I heard her say, ‘I felt I owe you an apology,' I was very grateful.”

Frey began writing again, this time on a book that he planned to explicitly present as a work of fiction. He also met Norman Mailer through a mutual friend. “
So, you're the guy that caused
all these problems,” Mailer said. “For forty years they stomped on me, and you have the privilege of being stomped on for the next forty years.”