Latest news with #memoir
Times
2 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.'
CTV News
15 hours ago
- Business
- CTV News
Sleep Country co-founder reveals crack cocaine addiction in candid memoir
In 1996, Canadian entrepreneur Gordon Lownds was in the midst of two of the most pivotal moments of his life: The launch of the uber-successful Sleep Country Canada business, and the beginnings of an all-consuming drug addiction. In Cracking Up, what Lownds describes as an 'unlikely addict's memoir,' the Toronto-born entrepreneur recounts his first ever experience with drugs aged 48, his quick descent into addiction and his subsequent recovery less than three years later. The memoir, written a year after recovery, differs from others in that Lownds' experience was as intense as it was brief. The addiction essentially lasted 1,000 days, he remarks, and had come after a lifetime abstaining from experimentation. 'I think I've been drunk like 10 times in my entire life, and I can remember each one of them,' he says from his home in Vancouver Island's Black Creek. 'Booze was never a big thing with me, and I'd seen people's lives get destroyed with drugs … and I just, I just never thought I would ever be in that situation.' Lownds recounts his first experience with drugs as one that had been suggested and then egged-on by his then-girlfriend Annabelle, an exotic dancer from the United States. Just two years short of turning 50, the businessman was at the pinnacle of his career in the midst of expanding Sleep Country Canada's four initial stores in Vancouver to include over a dozen more across the country. 'I was divorced. At the time, my family had moved back to Toronto. I was on my own in Vancouver. I got involved with a stripper from Seattle, which is obviously a bad decision,' he says. Lownds recalls how he let Annabelle move into his penthouse apartment, against his 'better judgment,' only to discover she had a hidden addiction to crack cocaine. One afternoon, after another row over her reluctance to complete the treatments Lownds had attempted to enroll her in, she requested he experience the drug to better empathize with her struggles. It was an 'ill-advised experiment' that saw him hooked on the substance within six months. Within the year, he was injecting the substance intravenously. 'It was a very rapid descent into the worst possible parts of an addiction,' he says. Lownds transformed from being a lofty businessman terrified of stepping foot in the Downtown Eastside to becoming someone embroiled in the scene to such an extent that sex workers and drug dealers were comrades. Now, he laughs, he could 'give tours' of the DTES. Throughout the three-year period of addiction, Lownds estimates he spent over $700,000 on cocaine and the associated lifestyle that comes with it. Yet he describes himself as a high-functioning addict, professing his addiction didn't impair his ability to drive the Sleep Country Canada business. 'From a business point of view, the world didn't know that I had a problem,' he says. Even in the midst of his recovery journey, spurred on by hitting 'rock bottom' via an overdose and an arrest two years in, he was able to create the successful hearing aid retailer Listen Up! Canada. 'The recovery probably took me 10 years to get back on my feet, and within three or four years of getting clean, I started that second company, so I was functioning well enough to do that,' he says. 'And that turned out quite well.' Lownds deters from the common tropes of addiction memoirs when he discusses his recovery. Instead of waxing lyrical about the treatment plans, he details the negativity that permeates the 12-step meetings and the tendencies attendees have to seek apologies for their past mistakes rather than genuine recovery. Such people are the reason why he abandoned meetings in favour of working with his own, personal psychiatrist, he says. The book is honest, brutally so, and Lownds describes his drug and sex escapades in such an expletive-laden manner that he feels obliged to chime in at certain points to directly address the reader – he doesn't 'want to offend,' he assures. When asked whether he is concerned over the potential shifting of his public image in light of the book's release, he seems unbothered. 'I've spent many, many years in business. I've made friends and I've made enemies, and I'm not particularly concerned about the people who might find this subject matter, or my story within that subject matter, offensive,' he says. Lownds' primary concern with exposing his experience so publicly was the effect it would have on the individuals who do matter – his daughter, his ex-wife, his business associates and close friends. It took time to 'fix those relationships,' and now that trust is regained, 25 years on, Lownds says he feels comfortable publishing his story in the hopes that it will help others. 'It's useful to share stories where some people have managed to conquer their demons and come out of it doing OK,' he said. 'It's basically to give a sense of hope and deliver the message that, no matter how messed up you are, how screwed up your life is, it's never too late to turn things around and fix things.'
Khaleej Times
19 hours ago
- Politics
- Khaleej Times
'I just couldn't watch anymore': Former CNN anchor on the emotional cost of bearing witness
By the time Hala Gorani was ten, she had already delivered her first news report. But it wasn't on television or to an audience of millions. It was to her father, who was returning home after work, unaware that President Ronald Reagan had just survived an assassination attempt. Gorani, who had been glued to the special coverage on TV, relayed every detail she could remember. There were no phones then, no Internet. Just her childlike curiosity and the instinct to inform. 'I essentially reported it to him,' she recalls. 'And I was only ten.' That moment planted a seed. For Gorani, it was the start of a calling. One that would eventually span more than two decades at CNN, take her to the frontlines of conflict, and establish her as one of the most trusted faces in international news broadcasting. Today, Gorani is also a published author, with her recent memoir But You Don't Look Arab exploring identity, belonging, and the politics of perception through the lens of her own upbringing between Washington and Paris as a Syrian-American woman navigating the world. A childhood of contradictions Born to Syrian parents, Gorani grew up between Washington D.C. and Paris. Her childhood, like her identity, was a jigsaw of places, languages, and expectations. 'I have all these overlapping identities,' she says. 'And that made me, for a long time, feel out of place everywhere.' Her parents divorced early, splitting her upbringing across continents. Home was a fluid concept for Gorani, one not necessarily rooted in a postcode but in the rituals of constant movement and readjustment. 'My origin didn't match where I lived,' she adds. 'But now, more people than ever are in this situation. You're born in one country, raised in another, work in a third. So, where do you belong?' In cities like Dubai, where over 90 per cent of the population is non-Emirati, Gorani's sense of hybrid identity resonates deeply. 'You build your own definition of home,' she says. 'That's what I've learned to do.' Coming full circle Gorani's memoir isn't simply a personal reckoning but also a broader cultural reflection on what it means to live between identities, and how the label 'Arab' has been shaped, flattened, and misread by Western and even Middle Eastern societies alike. 'Even the title, 'But You Don't Look Arab', came from something I heard countless times,' she says. 'It speaks to the assumptions people make about how you're supposed to look, speak, or behave based on where you're from.' The book marks a new chapter in her career, but also reveals the same rigour that defined her journalism trajectory. She has previously covered the war in Iraq, the 2006 conflict in Lebanon, and the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, among others, always gravitating towards stories that humanise those on the margins. However, in 2022, after years of anchoring at CNN, a role widely viewed as the summit of broadcast journalism, Gorani chose to walk away from it all. 'You become a journalist because you want this sense of purpose, of telling stories, being where things happen,' she reflects. 'Anchoring a show, while prestigious, became more and more removed from that. I wanted to reconnect with why I started this journey.' Writing the memoir offered her that reconnection. It was a way of tracing the line through generations of her family — of women who moved, fled, or were uprooted, often without choice. 'I realised one generation after another, for one reason or another, migrated or felt displaced,' she adds. 'From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to Syria to France to the US, my great-great-grandmother was forced to move to a place she'd never seen before. I'm just one more stop on that long journey.' The cost of bearing witness With such deep-rooted displacement comes an instinct to bear witness and Gorani has done that, often at great personal cost. During the early days of the Syrian revolution, she watched harrowing videos daily: graphic footage of violence against demonstrators, scenes she now associates with post-traumatic stress. 'I became incapable of watching such videos anymore,' she admits. 'I'd take my earpiece out when anchoring if I knew the story was too hard. I just didn't want to hear children crying.' Recognising those emotional boundaries was, she says, an act of strength. 'You're not supposed to be desensitised to people getting killed. It's not a weakness to say 'I can't'. It's strength.' And even now, she draws her limits. 'I've never watched an ISIS execution video. I don't care who's in it. The thought is enough.' Gorani is also acutely aware of journalism's precarious future. 'The media industry is in flux. Legacy platforms are shrinking. Local papers are shutting. Social media has taken over but it doesn't pay journalists for their work,' she adds. 'I spent three and a half weeks fact-checking a story on Syria. That's what people don't see. Journalism takes time, and that's what makes it journalism.' Still, she understands why Gen-Z might hesitate to enter the field. 'You're competing not just with other networks now, but with TikTok, YouTube, everyone.' What keeps us from breaking? Her memoir contains a powerful line: 'As a journalist, I record the time, the place and the facts. As a human being, I want to know why some people don't break'. She pauses when asked where that resilience comes from. 'I don't know. I'm still observing,' she says. 'Some people are just born with more resilience. I've interviewed journalists in Gaza recently. Some are cracking, others are joking and smiling. Is it upbringing? Is it temperament? Maybe both.' And as for her? 'Oh, I break all the time,' she says, candidly. 'I'm emotionally porous. I cry often, just not on TV. I'd be worried if I didn't feel anything. That would mean something's wrong.' The introspection that shaped her memoir has also helped her make peace with belonging, she admits. Not by finding a single place to call home, but by returning to her purpose. 'For me, fieldwork is a higher calling. It takes me out of my own head,' she says. 'Some people find it through parenting, others through service. For me, it's this.' And in journeying back to the roots of her purpose, not a place, Gorani reminds us that belonging isn't always tied to geography. Sometimes, it's about doing the thing that anchors you, even when the ground beneath you keeps shifting.
Associated Press
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
ScholarCHIPS Founder Yasmine Arrington Brooks Discusses New Memoir From Tragedy to Triumph
Book Discussion, From Tragedy to Triumph Author Yasmine Arrington Brooks Moderated by CNN's Abby Phillip Wed., July 2nd, 1:00 – 4:00 pm National Press Club, Washington, DC, 13th Floor WASHINGTON, June 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- CNN Hero and non-profit leader Yasmine Arrington Brooks discusses her new memoir, From Tragedy to Triumph: A Personal Journey of Healing, Love, Purpose & Legacy, with CNN's Abby Phillip at the National Press Club on Wednesday, July 2, 2025, at 1:00 pm. The book reached #1 on Amazon's 'New Release in Teen and Young Adult Social Activist Biographies' list since its publication in May. Brooks is the founder of ScholarCHIPS, Inc., a nonprofit that provides college scholarships, mentoring, and support to children of incarcerated parents. Since its launch in 2010, the organization has awarded over $600,000 in scholarships to over 100 scholars across the country, and earned Brooks recognition as a CNN Hero in 2023. Journalists and members of the public are invited to attend, as Brooks discusses her journey as a child of an incarcerated parent, her impact-driven work, and the urgency of investing in the next generation. The event will also include a Q&A session and book signing. Learn more at To request media credentials or schedule an interview, please contact Ms. Estefania De La Cruz at [email protected]. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE ScholarCHIPS, Inc.
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.
