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Telegraph
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The novelist ‘cancelled' by Oprah: ‘I'm here to be the most divisive author alive'
'I don't know whether I've ever said this publicly.' James Frey is leaning back in his chair, but his look is intent. 'I keep my f------ sword hand strong… That is born of battle. That is born of decades of having people come for me, decades of people f------ trying to finish me off. I have weathered storms, and I'm still here.' You'll know, at least in part, what those storms have been. Most famously, there was the furore over A Million Little Pieces, Frey's immersive account of drug addiction and rehabilitation, which he published in 2003. Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club – still a big deal today, but 20 years ago absolutely as big as publishing got. When it was revealed that many of the events recounted in what was billed as a 'memoir' weren't factually true – the authenticity of Frey's purported criminal career, for instance, the time he had spent in jail, and much else – Oprah hit the roof. Readers were offered refunds; Frey's agent dropped him. He was in the vanguard of what we now call 'cancellation'. But he was not cancelled. 'I've got over 39 million books out the door,' he says. 'We had to provide the numbers to The New York Times. And that's just the books with my name on them.' There are many others, penned with Full Fathom Five, the 'fiction collective' he founded in 2009 and has now sold to a French 'media-tech' company. During that time, he tells me, the collective produced over 40 New York Times bestsellers and a hit film, I Am Number Four. 'I don't look at Oprah as a bad thing. I'm here to be the most influential, most controversial, most divisive, most widely read literary author of my time. Put me up against anybody: I'll stand the test of time. The media still hates me. Academia will always despise me – but the record speaks for itself.' Before we move on, let's acknowledge just how obnoxious this all might sound, set down in black and white. And yet, in the course of our conversation, it doesn't come across that way. I commend an artist who will not be defeated, who sticks to his last no matter what. Frey is not troubled by the distinction between 'memoir' and 'novel'; his books are books. For the record, neither am I, insofar as I truly believe that as soon as you choose to tell a story – well, you're telling a story. A memoir is not the same as a scientific paper. It would be eccentric, to say the least, to hold them to the same standard. (I've read that A Million Little Pieces has since been 'reclassified' as a novel; rather brilliantly, on the Waterstones website, it is tagged as both 'fiction' and 'biography & true stories'. Marvellous.) Since that controversy, Frey has continued to publish steadily: the last time he and I met was in 2011, when his novel The Final Testament of the Holy Bible was published – by John Murray Press in the UK, but by the Gagosian art gallery in the US, in order to circumvent the publishing industry over there. ('I'm the only writer,' Frey says, 'that any major art gallery in the world has ever published as an 'artist'.') Katerina was released in 2018; there have been a slew of successful co-authored YA sci-fi books published under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore. Frey's new novel, Next to Heaven, is a page-turning satire of the super-rich set in the Connecticut town of 'New Bethlehem', a place which bears more than a passing resemblance to New Canaan, where Frey now lives. (He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, which he calls 'the Leeds of America', for its post-industrial toughness.) 'The accumulation of wealth in the United States, and globally over the past decade, has been unlike anything we've ever seen,' he says. It's a tale of glittering hoards and adultery and sex-swapping parties and murder. It's filled to the brim with brand-names and anomie (spoiler alert: money doesn't buy you happiness.) And it arrives at a time when our thirst for such tales seems insatiable: Big Little Lies was ahead of the game, but look, now, at how obsessed we've become with The White Lotus. To Frey, I draw a parallel to the new Apple TV series Your Friends and Neighbours, which stars Jon Hamm as a hedge fund guy who is fired from his job and starts to steal things from his, yes, friends and neighbours in his ultra-wealthy enclave. Frey guffaws. 'Jonathan Tropper' – the series' creator – 'is a super-old buddy of mine. We didn't know we were each working on those things, and the announcements for them both came out at the same time. And we were both like, Oh, you f-----!' But it's more than the zeitgeist of course: it's the story of America. Frey and I discuss the centenary of The Great Gatsby, another novel about 'extraordinary wealth and lawlessness', as he puts it. I'm making a link to Fitzgerald's world; Frey, never one for modesty, is ready for straight comparison. 'Fitzgerald held up a mirror to the society he lived in, and I hold up a mirror to mine, and they're not different. People will blast me but frankly I think Next to Heaven is close to as good as Gatsby. One hundred years from now, if we're all still around, I'd take that bet.' I really like James Frey, and I love talking to him. A conversation with him is energising, invigorating. No, I don't think his new opus stands up to The Great Gatsby. That said, I'm only a critic, and plenty of critics thought that Gatsby was, as one reviewer put it, 'a dud'. We'll only know, as Frey himself remarks, a century or so from now. But one way (at least) in which Fitzgerald and Frey differ is in their attitudes to the way they make their work. The former was famously meticulous, revising drafts to the moment of publication. But Frey tells me that since A Million Little Pieces, 'all my books are first drafts. I've never read a book I've written. They're not edited by anybody. I turn them into the publishers, that's that. Contractually I have total control of the text and the book. We did a little bit of work on this one, but that was simply because I had so much respect for my editor' (Robin Desser, at just-launched US publisher Authors Equity). He's also unlike many in his field in his enthusiasm for AI. 'It's the greatest research tool ever. It doesn't write my books, but it helps me with a lot of things. So, there's a history of New Bethlehem in the book. All I did was say, 'AI, can you give me a concise and complete history of New Canaan, Connecticut' – and I got all the facts I needed. Of course, it's not written in my style, not anything remotely like it, but the information is all there.' In 2023 Frey was the keynote speaker at a conference in Paris about literature and AI: 'I'm basically the only person who acknowledges using it.' When I ask him what his answer is to all those who would say – and I'm one of them – that these language models are all based, essentially, on the theft of authors' work, his answer is a shrug. 'Nothing I can do about it. All I can do is to take advantage of the tools that are available to me at any given time.' But then he's a businessman as much as he's a writer. When he launched Full Fathom Five – which took on a slew of writers to produce what is now called 'content' – he was seen to be taking advantage of clients, offering contracts for not much money and almost no control. 'I never got sued,' he says evenly. 'There was one article' – a big piece in New York magazine – 'at the beginning of that company by a writer who had tried to get a job with me. When I rejected them, they came after me, and I just shrugged. All that article did was help business.' You will not take down James Frey. He has known hardship, real hardship. He and his ex-wife lost a child to a rare genetic condition in 2008; he understands that everything is relative. Of the turmoil over Pieces and Oprah: 'Sure, it was a bad day, but I've had vastly worse. I've had hundreds of days worse than that one, right?' There's a lot of talk these days about resilience; how we cultivate it, how we instil it in the young. I may not agree with everything James Frey says or stands for, but I admire his resilience. I'm glad he keeps his sword arm strong.
Newsweek
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
'Movie Buff' Woman Naming Unborn Baby After Favorite TV Show Dragged Online
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A mom-to-be has been dragged online for her questionable baby name choice. Posted by Reddit user u/POPPACRAK on r/tragedeigh—the subreddit dedicated to unique and misspelled names—the sibling shared their disbelief and concern over her sister's unconventional baby-naming plans. Newsweek reached out to u/POPPACRAK via Reddit for comment. A stock image of two sisters screaming at each other, sitting on a couch. A stock image of two sisters screaming at each other, sitting on a couch. Prostock-Studio The 30-year-old is reportedly a "movie buff" and fan of shows like Naruto, Game of Thrones and the YA sci-fi series I Am Number Four, and has landed on a unique name for her unborn child: Hinata Daenerys Six. In the attached screenshot of a text conversation, the expecting mother explained the mashup name and even mentions considering "Aziraphale"—a character from Good Omens—as an additional middle name. The original poster (OP), 15 years younger than her sister, has turned to the internet for help: "I genuinely wish I was joking. This kid will be bullied." She laments that her sister dismisses her concerns, writing her off as "just being a judgmental teenager." "I am frankly APPALLED by my sister and her choice of name for her future daughter," the OP wrote. "My parents are currently trying to talk her out of it." At the time of writing, the post has received 10,000 upvotes and over 1,800 comments. Reddit users have slammed the mom-to-be for her "asinine" choice. "Your sister is clearly not mature enough to have a child. He KNOWS the kid will be bullied, she's just putting her own selfish larping b******* above that because she has no respect or consideration for the child," one user wrote. "This is the problem with people viewing a baby as an extension of their personality and not a living human being. I don't know if it's 'main character syndrome' or delusions of grandeur or what, but people naming their babies after weird sci fi or fantasy book characters is just cringey as hell to me," another wrote. One user suggested her sister to try out using the name for a week or two in real-life situations. For example, if she goes into a coffee shop, use that name for the order. If she meets a stranger, tell them Hinata Daenerys Six is her name. "Have her try to make a dinner reservation as good old HD6. Make her live with the name until she realizes how impractical it is, and how horribly people will treat her kid," they wrote. The OP provided more context in the comments and explained that she confronted her sister armed with the Reddit thread. She reportedly called her manipulative, selfish and egotistical. Her husband is also aware of the name and "doing nothing" about it. As it stands, the OP's parents are trying to talk her out of the name, but whether they'll succeed is yet to be seen.
