Twenty years after A Million Little Pieces became a global scandal, James Frey is ready for a new audience.
James Frey was, for a time, one of the most famous nonfiction writers in America. And then someone checked the facts.
In 2005, Oprah Winfrey selected his memoir A Million Little Pieces for her book club, only to learn soon after that he had fabricated parts of his story about drug addiction and his time in rehab. She shamed Frey on national TV for betraying the American public, and his publisher offered refunds. He was branded a villain, a fraud – and became perhaps the first cancelled man this century.
“Did I lie? Yup,” he told me. “Did I also write a book that tore people to shreds? Yeah.”
Today, lies are told with gusto, while facts are distorted and erased at the speed of tapping thumbs. Just scroll on the social platform X, formerly Twitter, for a bit and the Frey affair might look like a horse-and-buggy ticketed for trotting too fast.
As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.
This month, he attempts a comeback of sorts: he’s publishing a novel that centres on a swingers party and a murder. It features energetic sex scenes, rich-people shenanigans and eccentric punctuation. (Frey believes quotation marks are inauthentic.)
He’s hoping that his past fabrications, seen in the contemporary glare of the iPhone light, might not look quite as offensive as they once did. After all, the public has lately reconsidered former outcasts for far worse.
Even the central players in the Frey affair see it differently now. William Bastone is the editor of The Smoking Gun, the outlet that unravelled Frey’s account by publishing police reports that showed his criminal run-ins to be less dramatic than he had claimed, among other embellishments. It is the biggest story The Smoking Gun has ever published. But when Bastone tried to imagine the story breaking today, he sighed.
“The ability to shock and dismay people based on a story unearthing lies? I don’t think it would have anywhere near the effect nowadays,” he said.
My conversations with Frey were his first extensive interviews in about 17 years. He spoke with gale-force bluster punctuated by curse words, pausing only to replace his Nicorette gum. At 55, he has a bald head, a stubbly grey beard and three diamond studs in each ear. He drives very fast on suburban streets, as I learned when he toured me around in his vintage black Porsche near his home in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Frey has survived addiction (he didn’t make that up), the heights of celebrity and an epic public shaming. He has gotten sober, gotten divorced, raised three children and endured the death of a fourth. He has lived amid the city’s glitzy tumult and the suburbs’ moneyed mansions. He has a lot to say.
“For a long time, writers were fearless sorts of people who held mirrors up to society and showed us what was up. And that’s not the case anymore, right?
“Writers are scared of getting cancelled,” he told me. “Writers are scared of making work that makes people uncomfortable. Everybody wants a hug and a Pulitzer. I don’t. I don’t need either one.”
What he wants instead – what he thinks he deserves at this point – is a second look.
Frey sees himself as a maverick
When the world turned against Frey, the internet was relatively young. Facebook was still a website for college kids, and Twitter hadn’t yet launched. Frey was cancelled before that term even took hold.
He calls it the tsunami. Reporters sneaked into his apartment building to knock on his door. Paparazzi took pictures of his wife and baby. Every outlet imaginable published stories delighting in the self-professed bad boy’s fall from literary stardom. (The New York Times published dozens of articles about the scandal.)
Twenty years later, Frey sees himself as a maverick and dismisses the controversy with a string of expletives. “We’ve all been told to be polite, to be good little boys, to go to college and follow the rules,” Frey told me from his extra-large mohair Eames chair, which he had custom-made so that he could sit in lotus pose. “Not me.”
He believes that A Million Little Pieces reflected his personal experiences while speaking to deeper truths, as art seeks to do. When the facts were pedestrian, he improved them – the truth, but better.
“When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it’s not photorealist, is it invalid?” he asked. “When Rembrandt painted self-portraits, is he allowed to manipulate the paint to make himself look however he wants himself to look?”
The anecdotes were about 85% true, he estimates. Which he thinks is how accurate most memoirs are. He lied, he said, just like every other memoir writer has lied. “And I paid for it.”
At one point, he seemed to get annoyed with my questions – maybe when I invoked the word “hubris”.
“Did I fundamentally change publishing and literature?” he asked me, his eyes locked onto mine. “It’s a yes-or-no question. You’re asking me a bunch. I’m asking you one.”
I fumbled my words, but he didn’t hesitate: he helped uncork a publishing boom in memoirs, he said. And after that came autofiction, a genre where authors use their own lives, and often their own names, as grist. “I was working in autofiction before that word existed,” he said.
Frey’s new book, Next to Heaven, a dirty satire about rich people having sex and committing murder, is already attracting controversy. Online critics are asking whether he used artificial intelligence (AI) to write it, citing a 2023 interview where he spoke provocatively about training AI to mimic his writing style.
He maintains, adamantly and with expletives, that he wrote every sentence of Next to Heaven. “Not a word of the book was composed with AI,” he said. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, he told me. He did experiment with writing with AI for an earlier project that he abandoned, but, he says, that has nothing to do with his new novel. And he uses AI for research purposes – which, to be fair, an ever-increasing swath of humanity does, too.
“It doesn’t matter what I do, people are going to find some reason to come for me,” he said.
Frey lives in a modern home nestled in the woods of New Canaan, a town where his neighbour Paul Simon sold his mansion to Richard Gere (who apparently sold it again to developers). He has two bulldogs, Frances and Ruth, and art on his walls that seems plucked from a museum – drawings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Francis Bacon, a few Andy Warhols, a Rashid Johnson painting, Matthew Barney photographs.
After the scandal, he wrote young adult novels and founded and ran Full Fathom Five, a company that published hundreds of commercial books and produced film and TV projects. He sold it to a French billionaire in 2018 and went on to work as CEO of a video game company. (He now calls those “soulless corporate jobs which were paying me immense amounts of money.”)
It has all added up to comforts that most writers never approach – the art, the address, the Porsche in the driveway.
But he has never given up on writing. Frey has sold millions of copies of his books, both for adults and for younger readers, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. Next to Heaven is his latest attempt to be seen as he sees himself: an artist who belongs on the shelf alongside literary outlaws such as Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer.
The book is his first novel for adults since 2018, when he published Katerina, a previous crack at a comeback that didn’t stick. And if the new book doesn’t earn him the literary stature he wants, he has secured a shiny consolation prize: He has already sold the TV rights to producer Mike Larocca, who worked on Everything Everywhere All at Once and Extraction II.
“I’m a writer, I create books, but I’m also something else,” Frey said. “And I don’t know what that is, but I do things with art. I do whatever I want.”
The counsellor and the fury
Amid all Frey’s thunder, I was surprised to discover that he has made time for something more vulnerable: counselling people who have faced the public’s wrath.
A.J. Daulerio was editor of Gawker – a site not always kind to Frey – when Daulerio’s career imploded. Daulerio had published a private sex tape of Hulk Hogan, which led to a high-profile lawsuit, a terrible deposition and the demise of Gawker itself. With his life and reputation in tatters, Daulerio reached out to Frey, although he didn’t know him well. He says he found a lifeline.
“There was one guy who pretty much understood everything I was feeling,” Daulerio said. “James gave me a new vocabulary and a new kind of empathy.”
Frey didn’t sugarcoat it. He told Daulerio that his scandal would follow him forever, a reputational shadow that would stand between him and most people. But he also stressed that Daulerio could still build a life beyond it and rediscover happiness and purpose – both of which felt impossible at the time.
“Our relationship grew out of that,” said Daulerio, who is now married with three young children and runs a Substack about recovery. “He’s one of the closest people in my life.”
One story that Frey told Daulerio has served them both as a kind of personal fortune cookie. It goes like this: As Frey was readjusting to life after the scandal, he flew to Cave Creek, Arizona, to see Sonny Barger, the charismatic founder of the Hells Angels, and director Tony Scott. As Frey tells it, the three of them were sitting on Barger’s porch, when Barger leaned over and told Frey conspiratorially: “You’re one of us now. You’ve been kicked out of polite American society, man. You have been kicked out, and they don’t let you come back.”
Barger smiled and gave Frey a soft punch on the arm. “It’s better on this side of things.”
The scene was so cinematic and tightly packaged that when Frey told me the story, I wondered if it was true. Daulerio said he initially had the same question, but waved it off.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Daulerio said. “It helped me at a moment that I needed it. I don’t care either way.”
If Frey has found some perspective, that doesn’t mean he’s at peace. He contains a simmering anger that’s only partially submerged. In his writing and his therapy, he calls it the Fury with a capital F. During our time together, I caught glimpses of it.
As he showed me around his house, we walked past a punching bag hanging in the basement. In midstride, he flicked it with his fist, hard.
His fury erupts most clearly when he talks about Winfrey, whom he still resents for the public shaming. She had him back on her show in 2011, several years after the controversy, to apologise to him. In an emotional episode that included them hugging it out, she acknowledged being too harsh and not showing him compassion.
But he’s still angry.
“It’s the brutal hypocrisy of it,” he told me, his voice rising. “She told more lies to the public times a thousand than I ever have. And I’ll leave it at that.”
But he couldn’t leave it, and he got increasingly agitated as he narrated his internal monologue.
“You might be the most influential lady in this world, you won’t stop me. I will lower my head, and I will walk forward, and I’ll keep throwing punches until I die. You can’t stop me.”
Winfrey, through a spokesperson, declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions.
As I kept asking questions about his anger, his scar tissue and his relationship with the truth, Frey made a suggestion that surprised me. He said I should call his therapist.
Forever marked
Jonathan Fader has worked with Frey for about 20 years, since before A Million Little Pieces. For nearly an hour, he gamely described his patient’s inner life to me.
“There’s a rage inside of him, an intensity,” Fader said. “The fame and what you would call the infamy only intensified what was there to begin with, which was this sense of wanting to go deeper into the fire.”
Fader says that he has seen Frey master his self-destructive streak – which was so powerful that he nearly killed himself with years of drug abuse – and channel that fury into something productive.
“What he’s chosen to do in that space,” Fader said, “is to use that as fuel and say, ‘You think I’m a fraud? Okay, let me show you.’”
Fader, who spent years as the team psychologist for the New York Mets, understands how athletes face down stadiums of booing fans. He said that Frey experienced something similar when the media turned on him, and that despite his tough-guy bravado, he has been forever marked by it.
“A lot of this really hurt him on a real level,” Fader said. When Frey was so publicly ostracised, he faced a punishment that spoke to one of the deepest human fears, shared across all cultures – the fear of not belonging, Fader told me. “He had to live with that and find ways to metabolise that.”
Frey is close to his three children, ages 15, 18 and 20. The day after our first conversation, he took his son on a college tour that included a visit to Denison University, his alma mater. Frey and his wife divorced in 2021, after 20 years of marriage.
Hanging over him is the loss of his son Leo, who died in 2008 from a rare spinal condition when he was 11 days old. Frey has a portrait of Leo tattooed on his chest. “I’ve never recovered from it,” he said. But it has changed his perspective on everything in his life.
“Live through sitting with your wife, with your baby hooked up to a heart monitor, as she’s holding the baby, and you watch it go from 120 to 110, and 110 to 90, and 90 to 60, and 60 to 40, and 40 to 20, and 20 to zero,” Frey told me. “Then talk to me about what I think of a TV talk show host having yelled at me.”
The night’s closer
It was a rainy night in the New York City borough of Manhattan, and young, fashionable literary types crowded into a downtown loft space for “Perverted Book Club”, a night of erotic readings. It was so crowded that people sat on the floor and lined the wall, drinks in hand.
Frey, who must have been one of the oldest people in the room, sat near the front. He wore a black shirt and black pants, his head closely shaved. It was his first public reading in about 15 years, and he was tapped as the night’s closer, the first of several appearances with Dream Baby Press, a New York cool-kid literary publisher that’s hosting his upcoming book launch.
It can’t be ignored that the notoriety has benefited him. We are still talking about James Frey, after all.
Matt Starr, one of Dream Baby’s founders, has become friends with Frey and shrugged off Frey’s controversy as a weird, and kind of boring, blip. He noted that in contemporary America, both online and offline, crazier stuff is always happening. “When you hear an artist embellished some stuff, I’m just like, ‘Ummm, okay?’” he said.
At the reading, Starr introduced Frey as James “Fray,” a common mispronunciation – it’s “Fry”. He cited Frey’s book-sales numbers with admiration and didn’t even allude to the fabrications.
Frey sauntered to the stage, eyeglasses perched on his head. He revelled in his bad-boy status, announcing by way of introduction, “I am indeed on the highway to hell.”
He launched into a transcript of text messages between a married woman and an author named James, who’s looking for material for an upcoming reading at “Perverted Book Club”. The crowd tittered at the meta joke.
The texts he read quickly turned into sexts. Frey kept reading, and the sexting escalated into a plan to get together, then into an anatomically precise description of their sexual encounter on a dining room table.
The crowd shifted from giggly to rapt. Was this fantasy? Fiction?
Frey compared his orgasm (or that of the James character?) to speaking to God. “I pull up my pants,” he read from the final page. “I walk out. I go home.”
Did some version of this happen? Or did he make it all up? Frey relished the uncertainty. The crowd burst into applause.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Sam Dolnick
Photographs by: Erik Tanner
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