You do get this, or feel you do, from Frey, but it goes like this: “I’ve been
in conflict with everything for my whole life. That’s the rule, not the
exception. Conflict with myself, over ideas of how to live and think, what
to think, what to believe. My wife laughs and says I’m only comfortable when
there’s a fight. I have to have it. I’m at my best and most comfortable when
there is a fight. I feel I have to prove myself over and over again. I wrote
the first one, and it was a bestseller. It was doing well even before Oprah.
No one believed I could do it again, but I did it again [with My Friend
Leonard]. I’m in conflict with what writing is, in conflict with what
literature is, in conflict with what people’s acceptable standards are. In
conflict with the idea of what fiction and non-fiction is, or are. There are
things that will play themselves out. I’m not done with twisting the lines
of fact or fiction. I’m not finished with that issue by any stretch of the
imagination. There isn’t a great deal of difference between fact and
fiction, it’s just how you choose to tell a story.”
He is beyond unrepentant. Even without these words, you could tell that from
his body language, the whole set of his face. It’s not that he’s surly, just
that he’s not particularly interested in social niceties. He at first
appears more humourless than he is, preferring to weigh up a proposition
before letting a slow smile find its way out. One such proposition is that
he’s done very well as a fiction writer as the result of a profile based on
falsified non-fiction.
Again and again he returns to what he sees as a double standard in the
portrayal of him. “The US media wants to hold me to standards it supposedly
holds itself to. But I’m not a journalist, I don’t claim to be one,
I’m not going to follow anyone else’s rules because they tell me I should.
The only standards imposed on the creation of [my] books are the ones I want
there to be. What means something is if my book is read in 50 years. That’s
the only goal. If I have to take some big shots in the process of trying to
make that happen, then I’m prepared to take those big shots.”
During the controversy, which he recalls today as “surreal”, a subplot was
unfolding; was Frey going to go crack up? Was he going to go back to
drinking and drugs and satisfy his haters with the poetic justice of his
own, real death? A journalist e-mailed to inquire: “Are you drinking again
yet, asshole?” One irony of Frey’s story is that his account of the perils
of alcoholism is right on the money; not just when it comes to the dire
effects of drinking to excess all the time, but also in the less well
documented areas of how the addict feels without his fix, long after the
physical withdrawals have gone. He was indeed an in-patient at the famous
Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota when he was 23. He describes the default
setting of the non-practising but non-reformed addict with a hard-won
insight, with the result that a sense of reliability spreads into the rest
of the book. If he is able to write with such candour about this, why would
he want to start fabricating in other areas? That’s the million-dollar
question.
He says, with undisguised relish, that his next book will be called The Final
Testament of the Bible. As he describes it, you couldn’t fault the honesty
of the title’s intentions. It will concern his ideas of who and what the
Messiah is – he doesn’t claim he’s it – as if Christ were walking the
streets of New York. It will be written in chapter and verse form. “I don’t
think my idea of what the Messiah would be is in line with what most
religious American people’s would be. I don’t think he would be a judgmental
person condemning individuals for actions that they may be genetically
predisposed to taking. It will be the third book of the Bible. If I do that
effectively, it’s going to ruffle some feathers.”
The son of a well-to-do lawyer, Frey was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and spent
the first decade of his life there until the family moved to the comfortable
town of St. Joseph in Michigan. His portrait of the parents in A Million
Little Pieces has them as decent but rather stiff, formal folk, utterly
bemused by what has happened to their son, and alarmed by their own
powerlessness. He says they have told him he got them about right.
Frey studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and did various jobs in the
city, later moving to LA with the idea of becoming a screenwriter. He had
been obsessed since his teens with the figure of the Great American Writer,
but he was already running a parallel commitment to alcohol and cocaine.
There is an elder brother, a teacher in Minnesota, with whom he is still
close. Several years before completing A Million Little Pieces, he wrote
screenplays.
But it wasn’t what he wanted. “I just wanted to write great books that would
have an impact on society, nothing beyond that. I don’t care what people
think or say or write about me. I didn’t come up through the ranks like
you’re supposed to. I haven’t got a fancy college degree, and I didn’t pay
my dues like you’re meant to. I was a Hollywood screenwriter who came up
from a tradition of outsider writers. That’s who I am and what I am. There
are so many worse things that happen in life than getting pounded in the
media. I mean, nobody died. I didn’t have to go to war.”
If it was his aim to be instantly recognisable as a writer, Bright Shiny
Morning is a step in the right direction. Here is the distinctive brand of
piled-up, de-punctuated sentences. Someone once told him his style would be
ridiculed at a writers’ workshop, and couldn’t have given him a bigger
compliment. You have to hang on a bit, trust that the meaning will come
through, which it does.
There are four narrative strands in the novel, but – here’s the catch – they
never interlock. Think of Tarantino without the links. “I very deliberately
did not interlock the stories because I always think that’s bullshit when
people do it. It doesn’t happen like that. You live in separate bubbles [in
LA].”
The New York Times got two critics to judge it. One gave it a stinker, but the
other, Janet Maslin, portrayed it as the next episode in a classic American
narrative: “He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he
did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park.”
After the Big Row, Frey did apologise. In a “Note to the Reader”, carried in
subsequent editions of A Million Little Pieces, he wrote: “I embellished
many details about my past experiences, and altered others in order to serve
what I felt was the greater purpose of the book.” He also wrote that the
truth of the book was a subjective one, “altered by the mind of a recovering
drug addict and alcoholic”. In other words, the state he was in, early in
recovery from a potentially fatal condition, affected the way he viewed past
events; there can be a medical explanation for False Memoir Syndrome. He now
says that this note will be removed from future editions and replaced with
something briefer.
Did he not suspect he was going to face a storm, back then when the book was
starting to do well? Wasn’t it the case that he was already too far down the
lucrative memoir route to turn back and say, “Wait a minute, it’s not all
true”?
“I don’t think so,” he answers, meaning “No.” Then he goes on: “If you look at
other memoirs, you will find many of the same problems. But you have never
seen a controversy like that one.”
Why him then? “I think it had to do with the substance of the book, the way it
was written, the high profile, Oprah, me. I once said [in an interview] my
goal is to be one of the most important writers of my time. I don’t want to
apologise for that ambition, and I think that upsets people. A lot of them
expect me to be contrite and beg for forgiveness.”
That would be an alarming twist. People would never believe it.
