Literary Rogues

by Andrew Shaffer

  Bingham died of a heroin overdose on Thanksgiving weekend in 1999—five months before the publication of his first (and only) novel. His death still affects Wurtzel. “When somebody close to you kills themselves, there is blood on your hands,” she says. “I don’t understand how you say, ‘There’s nothing you could have done.’ ” She makes it clear that she’s not accusing anyone. “It gets tiring to deal with people who are chronically depressed,” she admits.

  Wurtzel appeared nude on the cover of Bitch, flipping the bird to the reader. “I don’t remember whose idea it was,” she says. “The art director had the idea for the particular way it looked. The book isn’t about me, but it’s using other people’s stories to answer a question I had about how to live.” Surprisingly, the cover elicited little reaction at the time, suggesting just how far American culture had come since the days of outrage over Truman Capote’s infamous “seductive” author photo on the jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms.

  A pair of framed photos from the Bitch shoot is hung on the wall of her guest room. When I question whether this is an appropriate place to exhibit nude photos of oneself, Wurtzel shrugs. “It just seemed too narcissistic to put them in the living room,” she says.

  Wurtzel has come under fire from critics for her “rampant egotism.” One critic complained that Wurtzel’s chronicles of addiction simply aren’t disastrous enough. “Her narcissism is so deep-seated she believes that because it’s she, Elizabeth Wurtzel, doing these things, they can’t help but be fascinating to the general reader,” Toby Young wrote. Other critics have been even more unforgiving. “Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands,” Salon’s Peter Kurth wrote.

  The criticism was nothing new. Similar charges have been leveled at memoirists for hundreds of years. According to one negative review of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, for instance, the most shameful part of De Quincey’s memoir wasn’t his laudanum usage, but his “habit of diseased introspection.” Nevertheless, Wurtzel took some time off from her “diseased introspection” to attend Yale Law School in the early 2000s.

  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.”

  25

  The Bad Boy of American Letters

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

  —JAMES FREY

  Nicholas 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 pub
lishing: 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”:

  Oprah Winfrey’s been had…

  A six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun reveals that there may be a lot less to love about Frey’s runaway hit, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, has sat atop the New York Times nonfiction paperback bestseller list for the past fifteen weeks.…

  Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have called many key sections of Frey’s book into question. The 36-year-old author, as these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states”…

  The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post $733 cash bond.

  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.”

  That afternoon meeting at Mailer’s loft reenergized and refocused Frey. He finished his novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and HarperCollins published it in 2008 to mixed reviews. He wasn’t stomped on for it, though, and even some of his most vocal detractors during the A Million Little Pieces scandal admitted that Frey was, indeed, talented.

  Next, he abruptly changed creative direction with Full Fathom Five, a book-packaging company based on an artist’s studio model—think Andy Warhol’s factory, with James Frey in the Warhol role. His goal? “To produce the next Twilight,” according to a New York magazine article that “exposed” the operation in November 2010. At the time the article appeared, Steven Spielberg had already optioned the movie rights to Full Fathom Five’s first bestseller, I Am Number Four.

  The Internet piled on Frey, calling his venture a “fiction factory” and a “sweatshop.” Is Frey a savior who is helping young writers navigate the publishing business and making them rich via his Hollywood contacts, or are writers who sign with him signing deals with the devil? Ghostwriting is not a new phenomenon. Neither is the studio model, which has been used by Hollywood for ages. “People like to make me out to be a villain,” he told a UK reporter. “I really have no interest in being cast as a bad boy in this case.” His insipration for Full Fathom Five, Frey said, was his sincere love of books.

  In spring 2010, Frey invites me to tour his SoHo sweatshop firsthand. “I’m there every day with my whip and my bullhorn and my team of pitbull lawyers,” he jokes in an e-mail.

  On the day I’m scheduled to meet Frey at his office, the skies are overcast and spitting freezing rain. “You should wear a wire and take backup,” on
e of my friends suggests. “Y’know, in case he tries to shank you or something.”

  I don’t wear a wire, but I would kill for an umbrella. When it rains in Manhattan, umbrella vendors usually appear from out of nowhere. “You imagine these umbrella peddlers huddled around powerful radios waiting for the very latest from the National Weather Service,” Jay McInerney wrote in Bright Lights, Big City. Unfortunately, even the umbrella peddlers go into hiding when it’s thirty-five degrees out.

  The doorman at Frey’s building looks as beaten by the weather as I am. He asks whom I’m there to see.

  “James Frey,” I say.

  He waves me by, a bit too quickly, as if I’m a condemned man. As the elevator rises to the fifth floor, a chill goes through my body. It’s just because I’m soaked, I tell myself.

  On the fifth floor, a large glass door automatically slides into the wall like something out of Star Trek. A cheerful receptionist walks me by rows of cubicles that belong to another company and drops me off at the Full Fathom Five office space: four cubes, where Frey’s employees sit, and an enclosed office that Frey occupies. I’ve been to an actual Chinese sweatshop, and the swank working conditions at Full Fathom Five are nowhere near as grim. As I’ll learn, the original press reports of a legion of recent MFA graduates churning out ghostwritten young adult novels for Frey were sensationalized—of the dozens of writers working from home for Full Fathom Five, only a handful are fresh out of college, and many of the studio’s writers even write under their own names.

  Frey is hunched over a computer, assisting one of his employees. No bullhorn in sight. In his appearances on Oprah’s couch, he towered over her. In person, though, he appears to be about average-sized. With his closely cropped hair, crisp white T-shirt, pressed khakis, and Adidas Superstar 2.0 low-top sneakers (white with black stripes), Frey could pass for a hip Silicon Valley executive. This is the bad boy of American letters?