Frey said Mailer even told him, right before he died, “You’re the next one of us.”įrey said he never considered whether A Million Little Pieces was fiction or nonfiction-and anyway, before the memoir craze of the nineties, it would have been published as a novel. Hemingway used short, declarative sentences Miller wrote about sexuality in the first-person present tense Mailer blurred the line between fact and fiction. As he pointed out, heavy hitters never write like the established writers of their own time. When he was working on A Million Little Pieces, Frey told us, he wanted to write in the tradition of Tropic of Cancer, “A Season in Hell,” and Paris Spleen-transgressive works by transgressive authors. “I’ve been asked everything.” And for the next two hours, as the snow piled up on the arched windows behind him, Frey delivered his opinions on the memoir genre (“bunk,” “bullshit,” a marketing tool that didn’t exist until several decades ago) fact and fiction (there’s no difference) truth (it doesn’t exist, at least not in the journalistic sense) Europe (where he turns for validation) America (which is obsessed with honesty and raises people up only to tear them down) the best writers (Mailer, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Cormac McCarthy) documentary (“a thesis on truth that hasn’t been proven yet”) Oprah (“I should have never fucking apologized”) the kind of writer he wants to be (the most controversial and widely read of his time) making literary history (he’s in it to “change the game” and “move the paradigm” he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world) self-editing (a trap for young writers) mistakes (part of the spontaneity of a work of art) and, most important, how to write (“don’t give a fuck” sit for ten hours a day, 600 days in a row “write what you want to write, and make sure there is one hell of a disclaimer at the beginning”). “You don’t have to hold back,” he told us. We all laughed awkwardly.īut he was game. Leslie Sharpe, the professor who had invited him, explained that we were studying the differences between “factual truth” and “emotional truth” and how memoirists address those disparities in their work. Grinding down on a piece of gum, he asked the name of the class. Frey arrived in a white T-shirt and khakis, promptly removed his boots, and walked around on a soggy carpet in his socks. The class took place during an intense blizzard. We were surprised Frey actually showed up. We had read A Million Little Pieces, Frey’s 2003 memoir about his harrowing drug addiction and time in rehab, as well as The Smoking Gun’s report detailing Frey’s false claims. ![]() In February, James Frey was invited to speak to a small seminar in the graduate writing program at Columbia called “Can Truth Be Told?” There were nine of us, and we were reading books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss for our discussion about the ethical questions that emerge when writing nonfiction. Photo-illustration by Gluekit Photo: Christopher Lane (Frey) Gluekit (body) Archive Holdings Inc./Getty Images (background) Getty Images (typists)
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