James Frey

Tuesday, Jan 10, 2006 12:03 PM UTC

A million bogus fabrications

Will James Frey's fans forgive him for making up parts of his bestselling memoir?

By Laura Miller

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Not much business got done in the world of publishing on Monday. Editors and writers all over New York spent the morning poring over the Smoking Gun’s lengthy, meticulous exposé of the fabrications and exaggerations in James Frey’s bestselling addiction memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” The afternoon they devoted to e-mailing and phoning friends and colleagues to discuss all the gory details.

The Smoking Gun’s admirably dogged investigation unearthed evidence that, among other things, Frey had exaggerated the criminal record he’d racked up by the time he checked into an unnamed Minnesota rehab center (later identified as Hazelden) and concocted a role for himself in the accidental death of a high school classmate. The small town police officers Frey claims to have insulted, assaulted and in one case hit with a car told the Web site that they have no memory of those encounters. Frey also apparently fabricated the existence of a fellow county jail prisoner whom the police allegedly bribed to beat Frey up during a three-month sentence that Frey may have never served.

These revelations come cheek by jowl with a story in the New York Times establishing that the 25-year-old writer JT Leroy, author of gritty/lyrical fiction based on his supposed real-life experience as a pubescent truck stop hustler and street kid, is almost certainly a 40-year-old woman whose sister-in-law was hired to pose as the boy. Now is not a comfy moment for the kind of writer who specializes in retailing his (or her) screwed-up, strung-out, hard-luck, down and dirty past.

Frey certainly isn’t the first author to run into trouble on account of his dealings with the police. When the investigative journalist J.H. Hatfield was revealed to have a serious criminal record in 1999 (he’d hired a hit man to kill his employer with a car bomb), his publisher suspended publication of his book, “Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President,” and eventually Hatfield committed suicide. Ironically, Hatfield’s career was ruined when the public learned that he was a convicted felon, while Frey’s may be damaged by the discovery that he isn’t one.

The Smoking Gun story, however, is most remarkable for its capacity to harm Frey’s reputation among two entirely different readerships. The sulky, disaffected young fans who admire Frey for the authenticity of his “in-your-face” macho posturing and “searing” descriptions of bodily fluids will surely be disillusioned to see their bad boy hero characterized by a childhood acquaintance as a “reasonably popular guy in high school” and described by the police as “polite and cooperative at all times.”

The other, bigger audience of readers who came to “A Million Little Pieces” via Oprah Winfrey’s book club may be willing to wink indulgently at Frey’s phony swagger — boys, as these ladies know full well, will be boys. But, observers are wondering, can they forgive him for capitalizing on one of those senior-year car-crash tragedies that seem to haunt every American community?

In the small, affluent Michigan township where Frey went to high school, two 17-year-old girls were killed and a 17-year-old boy was injured when a train struck their car. Frey tells this story in “A Million Little Pieces,” although he makes it one girl instead of two and changes her age to 12. In the memoir, he claims that he and the dead girl pretended to go to the movies to keep her parents from realizing she was meeting the other boy. After the accident, he maintains, the whole town blamed him, instead of the boy, a popular athlete who was driving drunk. Although in his book Frey self-pityingly describes the girl as his “only friend,” in reality he seems to have barely known her and to have played no part whatsoever in her death.

There’s yet another girl-related question, though, that has Frey skeptics speculating. Both “A Million Little Pieces” and Frey’s sequel memoir, “My Friend Leonard,” make much of his heart-rending romance with Lilly, a crack addict he meets at Hazelden. Frey defies the clinic’s rules to see Lilly in secret and is smitten with the purity of her wounded spirit. When their affair is discovered, Lilly gets kicked out and Frey busts out of the clinic to follow her. In a scene of high melodrama, he hitchhikes for miles, finds her “selling her body for crack” in a nightmarish urban hovel and rescues her.

But the course of true love never did run smooth, and Frey and Lilly are forced to separate again; Frey must serve three months in a county jail in Ohio after he gets out of Hazelden. Lilly plunges into depression when her beloved grandmother dies, and the only connection between the two, her lifeline, is Frey’s daily phone call. “I know there’s nothing I can do until I am out of here. Nothing,” Frey writes. In an epilogue to “A Million Little Pieces” and the beginning of “My Friend Leonard,” we learn that Lilly could not hold on until Frey’s release, only hours away, and she hanged herself in a Chicago halfway house. “I would have done anything for you,” Frey wails when he gets the news.

Even to the casual reader, this pathos-drenched tale has a dubious, overly cinematic quality. (Frey has worked as a screenwriter.) When I first read it, I wondered if Frey hadn’t simply lost interest in the relationship once the thrill of breaking the rules and the opportunity to stage exciting rescue scenes had passed. Nursing a depressed, traumatized addict through the daily grind of recovery is a grueling process, one that Frey was conveniently spared. This, more than any other aspect of “A Million Little Pieces” when taken at face value, emits a pronounced odor of fish.

Even with the Smoking Gun’s revelations, it’s difficult to ascertain what really happened in Ohio once Frey got out of Hazelden. The author has managed to get all records pertaining to his offense (beyond the initial police report) expunged. However, in an interview with the Smoking Gun, he admitted that he spent a “significantly shorter” time than three months in the Licking County jail, and eventually confessed that he was released almost immediately after reporting from Hazelden.

If that’s the case, what was it that separated Frey from Lilly, the fragile angel he desperately loved, in her final moment of despair? Was a vulnerable young woman sucked into the orbit of the maudlin, narcissistic persecution dramas playing out in Frey’s head and then spit out again, to fend for herself, when she no longer served a purpose? Was Frey indirectly responsible for her death? Or did Lilly ever exist to begin with? At this point, it’s anybody’s guess.

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Monday, Jan 9, 2006 8:01 PM UTC

What will Oprah do?

Broadsheet wants to know: since James Frey fabricated parts of his bestselling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," what will his biggest fan do?

By Hillary Frey

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This isn’t standard Broadsheet fare, but since this blog is about news that affects women, and since Oprah has an unprecedented amount of cultural power over American women, I felt compelled to bring to your attention the storm brewing over Oprah’s last book pick, James Frey’s bestselling memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” Oh, you just finished reading it too? Then please, please read on.

I wrote a piece a few months ago about Frey’s memoir; in short, I was disappointed that Oprah had chosen what I felt was a pretty crappy book after promoting so many excellent works of fiction over the years. I also suggested that perhaps debating a memoir — in this case, an addiction memoir — took away from the very idea of what a book club should inspire: a discussion of literature. I conjectured that Oprah and her followers would dissect Frey’s life, the causes and effects of his problems, rather than look at his book as a piece of work. Sure enough, Oprah has been urging her readers to send in stories of how Frey’s book “saved their lives.”

I received loads of mail from Frey defenders, male and female, shaming me for speaking badly of his book. So I wonder what kind of mail the Smoking Gun is getting today, since it has basically exposed Frey as a liar and wild fabricator. Published under the headline “The Man Who Conned Oprah,” the site has published a six-page article detailing how Frey made up details in his book dealing with arrest records and jail time. These might sound like minor infractions, but Frey has built his career on his outsider — and outlaw — status. To find out that he was once a lame, pot-smoking frat boy like so many other kids not only undermines his credibility, but makes one wonder whether James Frey’s “real” life story would have been interesting enough to secure a book contract.

More important — and way more crass, as the Smoking Gun also notes — is that Frey “also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students … [he] appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim.”

In October, I wrote that “A Million Little Pieces” — which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and is being made into a film — is nothing more than “the story of a spoiled boy from the suburbs who nearly lost his life, and then cashed in on his mistakes and the misery he caused to so many people around him.” I stand by that, although now I’m not even sure that Frey made the mistakes that he’s made millions of dollars from.

Broadsheet wants to know: What will Oprah do?

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Hillary Frey is the Books editor at Salon. More Hillary Frey.

Tuesday, Oct 11, 2005 11:30 AM UTC

Oprah’s book flub

Her latest pick -- James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" -- is bad news for her viewers and her show.

By Hillary Frey

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Late last month, Oprah announced a major change in her influential book club. Leaving behind the classics of Tolstoy, McCullers and Faulkner, she’s once again focusing on work by living authors. This time around, however, featured titles won’t necessarily be novels. Memoir, biography, history — they’re all fair game now. In the same breath, Oprah alerted fans to her first selection for the club’s newest incarnation: James Frey’s 2003 recovery memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.”

At first glance, Frey’s book seems like a fine pick. Although it’s a memoir, it shares with many of Oprah’s fictional picks an overwhelming message of triumph; the underdog has beaten the odds and come out on top. In “A Million Little Pieces,” the then-23-year-old upper-middle-class kid Frey (who shares my father’s name but is no relation) goes into rehab, where he kicks his addiction to almost everything: coke, crack, alcohol, glue — you name it. Rejecting the 12 steps, Frey relies on little more than the “Tao Te Ching” for support. His portrait of withdrawal is graphic and ugly; at one point, he undergoes two root canals without anesthesia (no drugs for addicts, after all), and he generally spends a lot of time retching into the john. But Frey’s is a success story — he gets clean and, judging from his follow-up memoir, “My Friend Leonard,” stays that way.

Yet, Frey’s book is a peculiar choice. The advantage to featuring books by living writers is pretty basic: Wally Lamb, Anita Shreve and Janet Fitch — unlike, say, Faulkner — are all available to go on to “Oprah” to discuss their work. And the point of talking about fiction is to learn about the craft, to think deeply about the way a story unfolds, and to recall and share that unique sublime emotion that comes only with investing oneself — heart and mind — in something that is not true. A novelist might appear on “Oprah” and have a conversation over dinner, with Oprah and a few viewers; the writer will answer questions about characters and all the imaginative choices that go into dreaming up a plot. But when Frey is a guest on “Oprah” later this month, how will that work?

Frey is the author and main character of his book, and the plot of “A Million Little Pieces” is his actual life. A discussion of Frey’s work, then, amounts to a discussion of James Frey. On the show — and in their own homes, as they finish their weekly assignments — book clubbers will pick apart the causes of Frey’s addiction and analyze his parents and what they may or may not have done to contribute to his problems. (And you do get the sense, reading the book, that Frey is very, very angry with his parents, even as he doesn’t outright blame them for his turn to drugs. Note: They pay for his rehab.) Readers will dissect the “rage” Frey carries like an old blanket throughout his book. Oprah’s fans — who have become careful, close readers of literature — will in the end rely on their skills in pop psychology as they try to make something of this memoir.

In other words, the conversation with, or about, James Frey will likely not be about creation, or books or literature, but about destruction — of Frey’s and his friends’ and family members’ lives. There is something inherently creepy about a million-odd people discussing — over a series of weeks, online and at home — how and why James Frey became a drug addict. And there is something frustrating in that these debates will take place under the guise of a discussion about a piece of writing.

But “A Million Little Pieces” isn’t a poor choice for the most successful book club in the world solely because scrutinizing it amounts only to picking apart its author. To put it plain, this book just isn’t that good. In 2003, just before “A Million Little Pieces” was first published, Frey gave a manic interview to the New York Observer during which he exclaimed, “I’m going to try to write the best book of my generation and I’m going to try to be the best writer.” Well, he’s not even close.

To be sure, Frey has perfected his own style or, rather, anti-style: his is a Kerouacian, expletive-laced, bare-bones kind of writing that eschews punctuation and radiates machismo. Oprah — who admits that “A Million Little Pieces” is “a radical departure” for her book club — says it’s “raw”; another reader might find it numbing. “Something else comes and it makes me feel weak and scared and fragile and I don’t want to be hurt and this feeling is the feeling I have when I know I can be hurt and hurt deeper and more terribly than anything physical and I always fight it and control it and stop it but…” Frey writes, on and on until “I start to cry. I start to cry. I start to cry.” He’s filled another page where each line consists on just one or two words: “Damage irreparable./ Cry./ Fight./ Mom./ Dad./ Brother./ Cry./ Fight./ Live./ Torch./ Pipe./ Bottle…”

Is this even writing? All of “A Million Little Pieces” is like this. His autobiography on the “Oprah” Web site is like this (though, to be fair, he uses more commas). In the book, each time he leans over the toilet to regurgitate bits of his stomach, he tries to drive home how hard and gross and painful it is to get off drugs. (“I crawl to the front of the toilet,” he writes. “When I get to the toilet, I vomit. The vomit is full of bile and brown shit that I have never seen before. It is full of blood. It burns my stomach, my throat and my mouth. It burns my lips and my face. It won’t stop. I heave and it comes, the burning vomit comes and comes again and again.”) But too often the horror of his reality is made unreal by his posturing, by his aggressive toughness, by the monotonous rhythm of the way he writes. If Frey’s story is powerful at all it’s for the facts — the sickness, the hurt, the fatigue of withdrawal — not for his rendition of them.

When Oprah started her book club, she quickly became the most powerful advocate for reading in America — reading novels, in particular. With our culture so heavily focused on literature of self-improvement and health (see the endurance of Kevin Trudeau’s “Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About” and Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz’s “You: The Owner’s Manual” on the bestseller lists), Oprah did a worthy and wonderful thing by encouraging so many people to read fiction. Of course some of Oprah’s fans were readers before, but surely thousands of others hadn’t picked up a novel in years, let alone participated in a discussion of its shape and story. Oprah has spawned an entire population of serious readers — who else can claim such an achievement?

And what about her impact on the publishing industry? A literary novel that sells 20,000 copies is considered a success; many books bearing Oprah’s stamp have moved a million copies or more. As Sonny Mehta, the chairman of the literary publisher Knopf, told the New York Times recently, ”The fact that [Oprah] had 300,000 people reading William Faulkner over the summer — she should be given a cabinet post.”

Like practically everyone else in America, I love Oprah. However, I can’t help but hope that she’ll return to fiction again soon or, at the very least, choose a different kind of nonfiction book for her next club — something that seems more distinct from the other content on her show. The problem isn’t that Frey’s book is a memoir per se; it’s that it’s a memoir of addiction, of recovery — and a bad one at that. The books in her club — especially during the “classics” years — were markedly different from much of the rest of Oprah’s show, which already covers this terrain. With James Frey, the book club is losing its identity as a literary feature, morphing into yet another vehicle for self-help. His story might be shocking, but it isn’t art.

Of course, it’s possible that after finishing “A Million Little Pieces” Oprah’s viewers will agree. We’ll see how the ubiquitous “fuck’s” and puke scenes go down, not to mention the endless one-word sentences. Maybe, after years of coaching from Oprah herself, her acolytes will see Frey’s memoir for what it is: the story of a spoiled boy from the suburbs who nearly lost his life, and then cashed in on his mistakes and the misery he caused to so many people around him.

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Hillary Frey is the Books editor at Salon. More Hillary Frey.

Saturday, Apr 19, 2003 7:45 PM UTC

The sound bite and the fury

Literary bad boy James Frey says Dave Eggers can eat his dust. His self-promotion is tiresome, but his addiction memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," shows he has the right stuff.

By Louis Bayard

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Should celebrity be classified as a controlled substance? Consider first the available medical literature: rambling and confused statements, delusional behavior, outbursts of megalomania, and in the case of People magazine’s Steven Cojocaru, unflattering shags — all triggered by the sudden and confounding infusion of quasi-fame. The blazingly dysfunctional path of today’s insta-celebrities is not something children should be exposed to or, come to think of it, most adults. Enough fooling around, then. Bring on the PSA campaign.

And for campaign spokesman, please consider James Frey, the rising author who has, in effect, done the thing he swore never to do: He has traded in one addiction for another. That is, he has written a ballsy, bone-deep memoir about coming off drugs — titled “A Million Little Pieces” — which he is now promoting with such hopped-up, synthetically fueled mania that reading his interviews becomes a form of retox.

“A Million Little Pieces” has all the hallmarks of a Publishing Event. An eye-grabbing cover: the Buñuellian image of a human hand sheathed in micro-pills. A movie-ready subject: the near-death spiral and phoenixlike rebirth of a rich suburban kid. (Boy, Interrupted.) A string of high-profile blurbers: Pat Conroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Gus Van Sant. And, most telling of all, a publicity Anschluss, engineered by Random House’s genteel Nan Talese imprint.

The big noise began with a now-famous New York Observer interview, two full months before the book’s release, in which the 33-year-old Frey wasted no time sawing off the legs of his rivals. “I don’t give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name does or what David Foster Wallace does. I don’t give a fuck what any of those people do. I don’t hang out with them, I’m not friends with them, I’m not part of the literati.” Don’t even get him started on Dave Eggers. “A book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody who says that. I don’t give a fuck what they think about me. I’m going to try to write the best book of my generation and I’m going to try to be the best writer.”

And that was just appetizers. Before he was done, Frey had revealed:

that the initials tattooed on his left arm stand for “Fuck the Bullshit It’s Time to Throw Down;

that the message in front of his iMac reads: “A page a day. Anything less is unacceptable you punk-ass-bitch-motherfucker. Anything less is unacceptable.”

that his wife calls him a savage “because I eat with my hands. Because my best friends are my dogs. And I like pit bulls. And N.W.A. And I love boxing. Writers aren’t like that anymore. They’re all these guys who have fucking master’s degrees and are so ‘sophisticated’ and ‘educated’ and … well, I’m not a guy with a master’s degree … I can write big fat books, but I’m not an effete little guy.”

Somewhere on Heaven’s savannah, Papa Hemingway was firing off Gatling-gun salutes. In subsequent interviews, Frey has struck a more chastened tone and has even exhibited some blunt decency, but any interviewer who sticks around long enough is bound to be rewarded with another round of chest butting.

“It’s a new phenomenon that writers aren’t willing to say, ‘I want to be the fucking best!’” he told Entertainment Weekly. “For most of the 20th century, when people like me grew up wanting to be writers, people like Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer — none of these people got into writing and didn’t take it fucking seriously. They got into it saying, ‘I’m going to write books that change people’s lives. I’m going to write the best book of my generation. I’m going to be remembered as someone who changed the way people think and write and live.’ Well, I don’t have a problem saying I want to be the fucking best.”

Shifting gears: “I don’t sit at home and think, ‘Okay, I’m going to make this person think this about me.’ To a certain extent, I don’t give a fuck what you think about me.”

A writer who wants to be thought of as the fucking best but doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. Oh, the webs we authors weave when we leave the safety of the printed page. I happen to think “A Million Little Pieces” will be a top seller with or without the aggressive hyping — as the most scalding account of addiction in recent memory, it deserves to be — but not all publicity is good publicity, and if these take-no-prisoner interviews continue, the book in question may soon be dwarfed by the Other Story: James Frey’s bombs bursting in air. He may become the latest cautionary example of how writers compromise themselves the moment they open their mouths.

Can any book live up to the expectations James Frey has created? Well, if this bullheaded, lionhearted book doesn’t reach the level of masterpiece, it’s not for lack of trying. Frey has devised a rolling, pulsing style that really moves — an acquired taste, perhaps, but undeniably striking. It may not make him the world’s best fucking author, but at least he can console himself with how far he has climbed in the world’s estimation. A decade ago, he was, by his own admission, “an Alcoholic and a drug Addict and a Criminal.” He had begun drinking while still a child. At 12, he was smoking pot. (It was the only drug he was able to give up: not strong enough.) At 15, he was selling drugs and liquor. At 18, he was blacking out every night, and at 21, he was throwing up, pissing and shitting blood. Booze, crack, pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP, glue: He did them all. And after skipping bail in three different states, he took a face-first tumble down a fire escape, broke his nose, gashed his face, knocked out four of his teeth — and woke up on a plane. The party was over.

When the book opens, Frey is being shipped off by his parents to Minnesota’s famous Hazelden drug and alcohol treatment facility. Prostrate and strung out he may be, but he’s no pushover. From the onset, he breaks rules, rebels against clinic authorities and rejects the 12-step pieties propagated by his well-meaning counselors — refuses, in effect, to follow the Recovery Arc. And so “A Million Little Pieces” ends up following an arc of its own. It’s about a stubborn, prickly, fucked-up guy who, with the help of the Tao Te Ching and some appealingly unsavory rehab mates, finds his own road back to life. “There is no God,” he declares, “and there is no such thing as a Higher Power. I will do it with me. Alone … Every time I want to drink or do drugs, I’m going to make the decision not to do them. I’ll keep making that decision until it’s no longer a decision, but a way of life.”

As Bette Midler once observed, when a cokehead says, “Let’s go somewhere and talk,” what he really means is, “Let’s go somewhere and I’ll talk.” And that’s essentially what “A Million Little Pieces” is: 382 pages of churning, self-mortifying, self-aggrandizing talk — no indentations, no quotation marks — nothing to stop the unspooling of consciousness.

“I open the door and I walk out. I make my way back to the Unit. Night has fallen and the Halls are dark. Overhead lights illuminate them. I hate the lights I want them gone. I wish the Halls were darker. I am craving the dark the darkest darkness the deep and horrible hole. I wish the Halls were fucking black. My mind is black my heart is black I wish the Halls were black. If I could, I would destroy the lights above me with a fucking bat. I would smash them to fucking pieces. I wish the Halls were black.”

This is as good an example as any of Frey’s style: the Germanically capitalized nouns, the steady drumbeat of baldly declarative sentences, the incantatory rhythms. Stretched to book length, of course, the baldness can turn portentous and the incantation can curdle into mere repetition. “A Million Little Pieces” is mannered, exasperating, far too long, stiff with masculine posturing, at times disingenuous. (How is the Tao Te Ching any less prescriptive or beholden to higher authority than the 12 steps?) And yet it’s a fierce and honorable work that refuses to glamorize that author’s addiction or his thorny personality:

“I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag full of mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.”

In this way, Frey earns his moments of awkward, hard-wrung pathos:

“The Gates are open and thirteen years of addiction, violence, Hell and their accompaniment are manifesting themselves in dense tears and heavy sobs and a shortness of breath and a profound sense of loss. The loss inhabits, fills and overwhelms me. It is the loss of a childhood of being a Teenager of normalcy of happiness of love of trust of reason of God of Family of friends of future of potential of dignity of humanity of sanity of myself of everything everything everything. I lost everything and I am lost reduced to a mass of mourning, sadness, grief, anguish and heartache. I am lost. I have lost. Everything. Everything.”

They’re not always pretty, these linguistic pileups, but coursing through every page is the author’s palpable desire — a desire that might effetely be called Dostoevskian — to scrape down to the very marrow, to transcribe everything, everything about this particular experience.

The result is a book that makes other recovery memoirs look, well, a little pussy-ass — a book about the body in all its horror. Spit, snot, urine, shit. The deadly shakes, wall-rattling screams. Skin gouging, hair tearing. Nails pulled off toes. A grueling, anesthesia-free round of dental surgery. And more vomiting than a whale-watching expedition:

“Blood and bile and chunks of my stomach come pouring from my mouth and my nose. It gets stuck in my throat, in my nostrils, in what remains of my teeth. Again it comes, again it comes, again it comes, and with each episode a sharp pain shoots through my chest, my left arm and my jaw. I bang my head on the back of the toilet but I feel nothing. I bang it again. Nothing.”

Frey is so unrelenting with the details that the occasionally protruding spikes of black humor are a form of clemency for the reader. I loved the moment when he describes his Hazelden buddies for his quietly appalled mother: “My closest friend is some kind of Mobster. My Roommate is a Federal Judge. My other friends are Crackheads and Drunks. I sort of have a Girlfriend, and she’s a Crackhead and a Pillpopper and she used to be a prostitute … They’re the best friends I’ve ever had.” And there’s a mordantly funny reflection on “Friends,” which is blaring surreally from the clinic TV: “The only people I know who spend so much time in one Apartment usually have black plastic taped over the windows and guns in the closet and burn marks on their lips and fingers and huge locks on the door. They are not witty people, though their paranoia can be amusing.” (That’s a remark one could imagine, oh, Dave Eggers making, but coming from someone who’s actually spent time in such apartments, it’s immeasurably more biting.) And, perhaps most enjoyable of all, is Frey’s rant against an unnamed rock star (Steven Tyler?), a Hazelden alumnus who comes back to deliver a highly romanticized account of his own recovery. “Were I in my normal frame of mind,” Frey writes, “I would stand up, point my finger, scream Fraud, and chase this Chump Motherfucker down and give him a beating … I would tell him that if I ever heard of him spewing his bullshit fantasies in Public again, I would cut off his precious hair, scar his precious lips, and take all of his goddamned gold records and shove them straight up his ass.”

That was Frey then. This, sadly, is Frey talking more recently to Entertainment Weekly: “When I walk into Random House, they treat me like a rock star. People are breathless. They can’t believe I’m alive. They’re like ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’” Sounds like just one more bullshit fantasy to me. Frey is being compared to lots of people — Eggers, Bukowski, Wallace — but the swaggering gait and the relish for the mike are more akin to Norman Mailer than anyone else. Like Mailer, Frey publicly grapples with the dark, unruly force within him. (Call it “the Fury”; call it “the Beast”; it doesn’t matter.) And like Mailer, Frey imparts the sense of an embattled ego struggling not just to assert but to impose itself, to clear the field of all comers. And so if we think of “Million Little Pieces” as Frey’s “Naked and the Dead” (the same foxhole camaraderie, the same insistence on male ritual), what are we to make of the public persona Frey is consciously or unconsciously creating through the unstable medium of publicity tours? Is this his “Advertisements for Myself”?

In fact, it took Mailer years to overcome his initial success. And while he went on to write great books — “Armies in the Night,” “The Executioner’s Song” — he has spent the last two decades playing the role of dial-up provocateur, obscuring his considerable gifts as an observer by allowing himself to be observed more and more by others. He blows hard, all right — so does Gore Vidal — but that doesn’t make either one of them serious.

I think James Frey, by contrast, is serious. I like how, in his Observer interview, he talks about “moving against the trend of irony” and being “a bullet in the heart of that bullshit.” A writer unafraid of feeling is someone to stick around for. But if celebrity is an addiction, and if addiction, to quote Frey, is a choice, then his choice begins now. He can spend more time in his glassed-in lion’s den, chewing on the red meat fed him by interviewers, or he can take himself as seriously as he wants to be taken. Squeeze the hyperbole out of his pores and quietly (or noisily) refine his craft and tell the stories he wants to tell. He can, to quote the Tao Te Ching, let it be. And maybe, in the process, he’ll become what he so desperately wants. At any rate, it’ll be fun to watch him try.

This story has been corrected from the original.

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Louis Bayard is a novelist and reviewer. His books include "Mr. Timothy" and "The Black Tower." More Louis Bayard.