James Frey still doesn’t get it
Until yesterday, I had watched James Frey only once, when he was squirming on Oprah after being exposed as a fraud. But he was doing a reading in Brookline Wednesday, and when a friend (and loyal Frey supporter) asked if I wanted to go with her to see him, I considered it an expedition into a foreign land. Which, in many ways, it was.
The book-reading section of the evening was unremarkable — he read aloud as if he were rambling, without pause or emphasis, the way a fifth grader might — but the Q&A was somewhat fascinating. For one, Frey still has supporters. They came out in force, at least a few hundred of them, applauding and thanking him and encouraging him to be strong. They referred to the scandal in vague terms, like “when it happened” or “back then.” Someone mentioned Oprah, and someone else in the crowd booed. When Frey explained why he doesn’t use much punctuation or paragraph indentation in his writing (he claims they slow the reader down), the audience laughed knowingly, and nodded, as if they’ve all been thinking for years, You know what’s keeping me from enjoying all these things I’m reading? It’s the fucking commas and periods and paragraph breaks, that’s what.
But that was the fun stuff. Frey’s moment of exposure came when someone asked him about his experience writing this new book (a work of fiction), and he said it was energizing and freeing. “This time, I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules,” he said.
I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules.
As if all his troubles before were caused by his having to conform to someone’s edicts. I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules.
Listen, James Frey: When you wrote your first two books, those memoirs that turned out to be pure fiction, there was only one rule you had to follow, and it was your own fucking rule: You said the books were true, and so they had to be true. That was it. That was the one rule — a self-imposed rule. And you didn’t need to impose it. You could have said the books were fiction — just another first-person story about a guy on drugs. But you said they were real, and so, rightly so, people expected them to be real. And when they weren’t, and when that turned out to be a problem for you, suddenly realism is someone’s rule, just some arbitrary ceiling meant to keep you down.
Come on, James Frey. All these years later, and you still don’t get it.
Frey does deserve one compliment, though: He’s very, very grateful for the readers who have stuck by him. He stressed it repeatedly during the Q&A session, and he’s one of the very few speakers I’ve seen who continues to take questions, even when the bookstore dude running the event says it’s time to wrap up.
“One more question,” the bookstore dude would say, for the third time.
“Ok, I’m going to take a few more,” Frey would say.
Afterward, Frey stuck around for more than an hour, talking to fans, signing books and taking photos. In my friend’s book, he wrote, “A beautiful life to a beautiful girl. Thank you for your support. Thank you, thank you, thank you. James.” That’s great and generous. I have a lot of respect for that.
But I don’t have respect for much else.
