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Times
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
America's literary bad boy is back: ‘I want to burn the world down'
The literary outlaw James Frey rose before a roaring, whooping crowd, and strode to the microphone. Then he gave us all two middle fingers, like a punk rocker from an age before most of his audience were born. Twenty years ago, Frey was perhaps the most famous writer in America. In his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, he portrayed himself as a charismatic crack addict wanted by the police, battling his demons in a smart rehabilitation clinic in Minnesota. Oprah Winfrey adored it and picked it for her book club in September of 2005, propelling it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks. A few months later, an investigative website turned up police records that challenged parts of the story in the memoir and its sequel. Frey had not spent three months in jail; he had been in custody for a couple of hours in relation to a couple of driving tickets. Winfrey summoned him on to her talk show and declared he had not only duped her but betrayed 'millions of readers'. This was, at the time, treated as the gravest publishing scandal of the millennium. Frey's publisher offered refunds, a film based on the book was cancelled, his agent dropped him and Frey was hurled, unceremoniously, out of polite society. He fled to France for a spell to escape the paparazzi, and later, to darkest Connecticut. Now he is back. 'What's up New York!' he cried at the launch party for his new novel, Next to Heaven. 'It's good to f***ing be here!' Dressed in a loose black T-shirt, black slacks with a pair of thick-framed glasses pushed back on to his forehead, he arrived at the mic to booming rock music. He then placed his book between his thighs and held it there, so he could raise both his arms for the middle fingers. He looked like Johnny Rotten in a yoga pose. 'I haven't done this in a long time,' said Frey (pronounced 'fry'), once the music and the shouting had died down. 'I'm a deeply solitary introvert who lives in a black house at the end of a dead-end road in the f***ing woods. I don't come out often to play or to start fires — to raise hell — but I'm here to do all those f***ing things!' During his years in the wilderness, Frey, now 55, founded his own company, Full Fathom Five, that managed a crew of young writers turning out young-adult science fiction novels. He sold it to a French billionaire and for a while he was chief executive of a video game company. Both of these pursuits allowed him to live in a large house in Connecticut with a Mercedes and a souped-up Porsche in the driveway. He also managed, exile or no, to carry on selling millions of books. One of them, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, in which Christ comes again, this time as a bisexual in New York City, was published by Larry Gagosian's gallery, in a limited edition, as a work of art. His latest, Next to Heaven,features sex parties and murder among the super-rich in a town that sounds an awful lot like New Canaan, Connecticut, disguised as 'New Bethlehem'. It is published by Authors Equity, an independent publishing company founded by Madeline McIntosh, the former chief executive of Penguin Random House, with two other big names from the industry. 'It's a new company funded by some women who thought that publishing was broken,' Frey told the crowd at his launch party, before reading what he described as 'some dirty shit' from the book. The publishers 'took a risk with me and I took a risk with them,' he said. 'I have never worked with an American publisher who didn't go into this with me scared. They were always scared. We never know what is going to come but we know something will.' McIntosh, for her part, insisted she was quite comfortable working with a hellraiser. Frey 'lives slightly on the edge', she told me. 'He doesn't want to play it safe. He wants to actually rock and roll, so to speak, and that's kind of the spirit of what we are interested in.' The actual rocking and rolling was now happening in a large, white cube art gallery in Chelsea. The event was sold out. The former head of Penguin Random House stood at the door, checking in young writers, poets and tech workers, a woman who makes a living as a rope artist, a 'pleasure educator' wearing a brown suede suit and a crop top, and at least one of the Real Housewives of New York City. Some of Frey's neighbours — smart, middle-aged folks in shirts and blazers — had come down from Connecticut. The actress Gina Gershon, who was in Cocktail and Showgirls, was there because she is a friend of Frey's and because she is the voice on the audiobook for Next to Heaven. When Frey asked her to do it, 'I said: 'Let me read it first,'' she told me. 'I thought it was so fun … It reminded me of sneaking in to my mom's room when I was little and reading her naughty Danielle Steel novels.' Looking around the room, I estimated about half of the 100-strong crowd must have been in primary school when the Million Little Pieces controversy exploded. 'Young kids like him, meaning people in their twenties,' said Matt Weinberger, a 26-year-old writer and photographer. 'He's able to embody this rock-star personality of a writer that we might associate with an older writer, with old New York, the Greenwich Village writers. That spirit is once again alive and well.' Callie Monroe, 30, who works in tech, admitted that the original scandal had passed her by when she was ten. 'I'm intrigued to read the book that started it all,' she said. She added she had come because she had heard Frey's recent appearance on the pop-culture podcast How Long Gone, in which he railed entertainingly against the literary establishment that had disowned him. 'I still see literature dying,' Frey said on the podcast. 'I see serious reading dying. And I see nobody doing anything to try to stop it, right? And it's not like I'm some grand f***ing crusader, but I love books, I love reading, I love writing. I think it's important. And it's becoming classical music, right? This very small thing that is loved by a small amount of people.' Most writers are too timid, he said, whereas he likes to write as if he's doing 150 miles an hour in his Porsche. 'When you … drive a car very, very fast on a public road, and when I say 'very fast' I'm talking very fast, it requires that same hyperfocus,' he said. 'It requires that same absolute fever dream of a state [where] if you make a mistake in a car at 150 miles an hour you die. And that's the sort of hyperfocus state I enter into when I write.' He writes to rock music, he said. 'When I'm writing about rage, I listen to rage-filled music. When I'm writing about sadness, I listen to sad music… I have to feel what I'm writing about when I write it,' he said. 'For rage, it could be Black Sabbath, early, early Black Sabbath. It could be Sex Pistols … [or Led] Zeppelin, or Guns N' Roses, Black Flag, all the punk from the Eighties, right? Like, music that makes me want to fight.' The goal is always 'to overwhelm a reader with story and unconventional application of words and grammar to make you feel things really deeply, to thrill you, to scare you, to turn you on, to make you feel hate, to make you feel rage'. In his opinion, most writers do not do this. 'I think writers today are mostly cowards,' he said on the podcast. 'They write books for awards and professorships. They don't write books to make great art. They don't write books to rock the world. They don't write books to keep literature alive. They write books for a hug and for an award.' But Frey wants neither a Pulitzer nor a hug. 'I want to burn the f***ing world down,' he said. 'I want to light it up. I want to force people to read things and think and feel and change and talk and believe that literature can still be great, that literature can still be transformative, that words still have power, that stories still have power.' It is hard to dispute the force of a Frey story. Clutching his new novel at the launch party, Michelle Moray, 59, who works in IT, said she could still recall reading A Million Little Pieces and its sequel My Friend Leonard, an account of Frey spending 87 days in jail. The Smoking Gun website went looking for Frey's mugshot and discovered he actually received a few traffic tickets and a misdemeanour summons, and spent only a couple of hours in the slammer. 'One of my friends was very upset when she found out it wasn't truly real,' Moray said. But 'I didn't care. I loved both of those books. Who gives a shit? The guy's a great writer.' The great scandal now seems small and far away. Cliff Wallach, 57, an old friend of Frey's, said that 'when it got called out that it was embellished, I was like: well, OK, maybe in a couple of places but a lot of it was real'. It matched what he knew of Frey. 'It was very much his voice,' he said. (True to form, Frey's latest book hasn't escaped controversy; some readers are dinging the novel on Goodreads over rumours — denied by Frey — that he used AI to help write it.) • The Times review: Corny, clichéd, lazy — James Frey's eat-the-rich novel is cynical tosh And though his debut memoir was all but blacklisted, it prompted a boom in autofiction — the genre that blends autobiography and fiction — practised most unapologetically by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in his six-volume series of novel-like memoirs titled My Struggle. 'The alt-lit scene in New York right now is so incredible,' Weinberger said. And now the man who started it all is back. Though he does not crave a warm embrace from the public, he got several anyway from fans who formed a long queue at the book-signing table. Did he feel like the prodigal son, I asked, stopping him between hugs and handshakes. 'People like to say that but it's not like I ever stopped, man,' he said, with a frown and a turn of his head. 'I didn't sell 30 million books in one year. I did it over 25 years.' He paused for a moment and turned towards me. 'There is an old story about some thing … that Ernest Hemingway passed to Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer passed to me,' he said. I stood waiting to hear what it was. A torch of some sort? A great truth about writing? He did not say, but lent in closer, looking me in the eye. 'I'm back to claim that thing.'
Telegraph
a day 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.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Protesters planning to disrupt Jeff Bezos' Italian wedding
Italian protesters are planning to disrupt billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos' wedding to Lauren Sanchez in Venice next week. No Space for Bezos activists last week launched a campaign using banners and signs to make their feelings known about the star-studded event coming to town. Next week, when Bezos and his guests are expected to visit Venice from June 24 to June 26, activists plan to block the city's narrow streets and canals to make things difficult for the Amazon founder and his jet-setting guests, according to the BBC. 'We want to spark a citywide conversation and to say that people like Bezos — who represent a future we don't want and a world we don't want to live in — are not welcome here,' 33-year-old No Space for Bezos supporter Federica Toninelli told British media. Protesters worry the scenic and often visited city is being exploited by wealthy tourists as exemplified by Bezos' nuptials. Celebrities including Katy Perry, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, Eva Longoria and Ivanka Trump have reportedly been invited to attend what's expected to be a 200-person gathering. Mayor Luigi Brugnaro has expressed disappointment about the way protesters are responding to Bezos' big day. 'I hope (Bezos) doesn't have second thoughts,' Brugnaro said. Association of St. Mark's shopkeepers Setrak Tokatzian reportedly told Italian media that well-financed events that provide work for local businesses should be embraced by Venetians. 'Otherwise all we have left is increasingly low-cost tourism,' he said. Events tied to the wedding ceremony are expected to be held on the island of San Giorgio near St. Mark's Square. No Space for Bezos organizers expect vows to be exchanged at the historic Church of the Abbey of Misericordia, though Bezos hasn't confirmed that suspicion. Guests are believed to be staying in Venice's most exclusive hotels and on yachts owned by Bezos. Forbes estimates Bezos' worth to be $230 billion. _____
NZ Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Oprah shamed him. He's back anyway
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
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Hollywood billionaire who smuggled a stray dog from Ireland and cloned her five times
For more than half a century, Barry Diller was one of the most feared men in Hollywood. When he ran 20th Century Fox, he once got so frustrated at an employee, he hurled a video tape at a wall. (The employee put a frame around the hole.) The American billionaire media executive, who has also headed up Paramount, IAC and Expedia, has won contentious lawsuits against competitors and close friends alike. Even his friend Oprah Winfrey said she was afraid to meet Diller the first time they had dinner. But with the publication of his new memoir, Who Knew, the world has learned that the gruff, terse, domineering Diller has a softer side. In the book, the 83-year-old mogul came out as gay, but also writes vividly about his love for his wife, the famed fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg – 'the miracle of my life' – whom he married in 2001, and her children and grandchildren. Diller calls them his family. He, who had distant parents and an abusive, heroin-addicted brother, also has several passages in the book describing how he cried at tough moments, both personal and professional. Nothing, however, makes Diller turn to mush like talking about his beloved late dog, Shannon, and her five cloned 'daughters' (though technically they're closer to replicas). READ MORE 'They're all little Irish girls,' Diller gushes. The billionaire hates talking about himself, but he is happy to talk to The Irish Times about Shannon and her clones – which are objects of fascination in Hollywood. 'How can you even describe what you love?' Diller says about Shannon, his late Jack Russell terrier, when asked to explain why he was so infatuated with her. 'She was a super dog. She was just the loveliest, most adventurous – she was a wondrous little animal.' Barry Diller's dogs Shannon and Evita when they met in 2013 Diller first saw Shannon when he was on holidays in Ireland in 1999. He cannot recall the town's name, but says it was 'south of Shannon, about 30 minutes by helicopter'. After having lunch in a small restaurant, he exited and saw his future pup on the street. She began following him around. He inquired about her owner and was told she belonged to a waitress. But when he saw the dog at another restaurant down the road the following day, he inquired again and was told the nameless puppy had no owner. 'I scooped her up,' says Diller. He was flying out that day. In an instant, the dog went from lonely and homeless in rural Ireland to a cosseted traveller on a private jet with a life most people can only dream of. En route back to the United States, they had a layover in Shannon Airport, and the puppy was nameless no more. He jokes that he told Shannon to hide in the back of the jet until they cleared customs. 'She made it to New York as an undocumented immigrant,' says Diller. They lived together at the von Dillers' Beverly Hills mansion until her death in 2014. It was a canine Cinderella story. Barry Diller with his dog. Photograph: Diane von Furstenburg Instagram The year before she died, some of Shannon's tissue was biopsied and shipped to a biotech company in South Korea. Upon arriving it was injected into an enucleated egg from a canine surrogate donor, thus becoming a cloned embryo, which was then inserted back into the surrogate. Six months later, the first clones were born, and delivered back to Diller in the United States. First came Dina (a play on DNA) and Evita, then Tess in 2016, Luna in 2021 and Bossie and Birdie in 2024. Diller says they all have the 'ethos' of Shannon, and that their personalities are only 'very slightly different'. Diller took Dina back to Ireland to 'explore her roots'. She lived a full life, living between Beverly Hills, their compound in Connecticut, the Carlyle Hotel in New York's Upper East Side, and their Art Deco yacht Eos. But she met an unfortunate end while in Costa Rica, hiking with Diller and von Fürstenberg. She was eaten by a crocodile. 'A country I'll never return to,' says Diller bitterly. Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller arrive on the carpet for the 2023 Met Gala. Photograph: EPA Diller was early to the animal cloning game, even among those who can afford the six-figure-per-clone price tag. Barbra Streisand cloned her Coton de Tulear in 2017, but chose a cheaper cloning service. Celebrities from Simon Cowell to Paris Hilton have publicly mused about doing the same with their own canine companions. Does Diller consider himself a trendsetter? 'We've given endless, endless details to people about our cloning experience, when they ask about it,' he says. It has been said that von Fürstenberg murmurs to friends that she is sure Diller will clone her, too. He writes in his memoir that she is the only woman he has ever loved. Does he plan on creating a carbon-copy wife to match his carbon-copy dogs? 'Of course,' he says, laughing.
