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Irish Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on the Salt Path controversy: what should we expect from a memoir?
In the annals of literary deception, the unreliable narrator has long been a familiar figure: a useful construct in novels, a sly wink to readers who know not to trust every sentence. Less familiar, though increasingly prevalent, is the unreliable author. In an age where memoirs are published and consumed with the reverence once reserved for sacred texts, the current controversy surrounding The Salt Path and its author, Raynor Winn, reopens old questions about the uneasy covenant between truth, storytelling, and the commercial allure of authenticity. Winn's bestselling memoir, which charts a journey of homelessness, illness and redemption along Britain's South West Coast Path, was embraced not just for its lyrical prose but for its claim to lived experience. It was adapted into a film which was well received on its recent release. That it now faces scrutiny over factual inconsistencies – some significant, some trivial – recalls James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, an addiction memoir later exposed as heavily embellished. What is it about the memoir that leads to this type of controversy? Partly it is the genre's paradoxical nature: shaped by the subjective impressions of memory yet marketed as unfiltered truth. Unlike the novel, the memoir makes a tacit promise to the reader: this happened, exactly as I say it did. When that pact is broken, the betrayal is not only literary but ethical. The fault does not lie solely with authors. Publishers and readers, too, collude in the myth of the pure, unmediated self. We crave stories that are not just well-told but demonstrably true. Truth, in this context, becomes a kind of currency. And where there is currency, there is temptation. READ MORE Perhaps it is time to abandon the binary of truth and falsehood in favour of something more honest: a recognition that narrative, even in memoir, is construction. This is not to excuse fabrication, but to question our often naive appetite for the unvarnished self. The unreliable author, like the unreliable narrator, may be less a fraud than a mirror, showing us not who they are, but what we want them to be.
Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Salt Path scandal: the juiciest literary scams, from James Frey to JT LeRoy
Ever feel like you've been had? Readers of Raynor Winn's bestseller The Salt Path are smarting after the author was accused at the weekend of weaving a tissue of whoppers into her story. This redemptive, heart-warming memoir about Winn and her husband, Moth, is facing allegations that lots of it was made up — including the couple's names. People expect memoirs to be truthful, especially when they carry a big emotional payload — and even though we all know there's no such thing as the whole truth. But some literary fraudsters are more notorious than others. Here are some of the worst — and the best. If literary history has taught writers one thing, it's don't mess with Oprah Winfrey. Frey wrote a sentimental memoir, A Million Little Pieces (2003), about his (real) drug addiction, which turned out to be extravagantly exaggerated in every direction. Maybe we should have been alerted by the fact that he says in the book 'lying became part of my life'. Winfrey, who had chosen his memoir for her book club, was not happy. 'You betrayed millions of readers,' she scolded him on TV. In those more innocent times the deception was headline news and Frey was contrite, at least to begin with. But you can't keep a rascal down and Frey continued to publish books, even if there was no evidence he could actually write. 'Remarkably boring … the language is dead,' said our chief literary critic of Frey's latest bomb. Frey also set up a 'fiction factory' to help other writers to churn out commercial children's fiction and these days takes a high-minded view of his earlier fraud. 'When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it valid?' he asks. Well, in an age where fake news is not just accepted but cheerfully promulgated by some of the most powerful men in the world, perhaps Frey was just ahead of his rating: 10/10. The guv'nor. Utterly shameless. Somebody stop him! Early in the 21st century two slim volumes of fiction appeared — a novel, Sarah, and collection of stories, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things — which purported to be autobiographical tales featuring all the lip-smacking stuff of misery memoirs: abuse, prostitution, abduction, the lot. They were lapped up by readers and critics, and the author JT LeRoy — a former rent boy and drug addict — became a cult figure, even writing for this newspaper. However, LeRoy was publicity shy and only appeared in public disguised with sunglasses and a blond fright wig that made Andy Warhol's look understated. Under the wig, it turned out, was the younger sister-in-law of the real author of LeRoy's books: the American author Laura Albert, who rightly surmised that a transgressive teen would get more attention than a middle-aged woman. Initially she tried to argue that JT LeRoy was a character living inside her but the game was up. We could give Albert credit for stopping when the deceit was discovered but the work was so closely linked to the persona that a Frey-like renaissance was never rating: 8/10. Almost a work of performance art. Sneaking admiration. • I'm devastated by the Salt Path 'lies'. It meant so much to me In 1943 an Australian literary magazine thought it had discovered a previously unknown modernist master of poetry. Poems by the late Ern Malley were sent to them by his sister Ethel, who'd been clearing out after his death. The poems were … intense, full of meaningless phrases like 'my omphagic ear' and 'the black swan of trespass' that, if it were done today, you'd assume were the output of ChatGPT after too much coffee. Some of the verse was obviously a joke ('he/ who has caparisoned a nun dies/ with his Twankydillo at the ready') but the mag lapped it up. Later the editors were fined for publishing obscene material, which implies that someone actually understood what the poems meant. But as the critic Robert Hughes pointed out, 'Ern Malley was not dead, for he had never lived'. His poems had all been written in an afternoon by two young army men, Harold Stewart and James McAuley. The only people happier than the editors who discovered Ern Malley were the editors who discovered the rating: 7/10. So obviously nonsense yet they got away with it — for a while. Who wouldn't love to see a private letter from a famous wit like Dorothy Parker or Noël Coward? For a while in the 1990s, the American biographer Lee Israel made it possible: she forged letters from writers, giving people a bit of juice (Coward, in one, complained about Julie Andrews's teeth), then sold them to memorabilia dealers — more than 400 times. Like JT LeRoy's creator, Israel was a frustrated writer and figured out a way to get people to actually read what she wrote. The problem was that if people took it seriously when they were duped by a book, it became really personal when they were fooled by a fake letter. Israel was unrepentant: the fake letters were 'larky and fun and totally cool'. The courts disagreed: Israel was prosecuted for the money she fraudulently made from the sale of the letters, and narrowly escaped prison. Where anyone else might have laid low and adopted a new career in underwater basket-weaving, Israel instead 'did a Frey' and published a rebarbative, entirely unapologetic memoir about the affair in 2008, which became a hit film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy. Which shows that if there's one thing that unites such fraudsters, it's not knowing when to stop. (The correct answer is 'just before you start'.)Pinocchio rating: 6/10. Credit given for sheer energy and range. Gore Vidal called it 'a moving account of an artist too well understood by his time'. For David Bowie it was a 'quiet and moving monograph'. In 1998 William Boyd's illustrated biography of the rediscovered New York artist Nat Tate, launched at Jeff Koons's studio on April 1, was a sensation — and it was all a big fib. Vidal and Bowie were in on the joke. Boyd, who likes nothing better than creating a whole life from nothing, invented an artist, wrote his biography, stuffed the book with plausible photos and even sold one of Tate's paintings at auction — to Anthony McPartlin from Ant and Dec. (The proceeds went to charity.) And Boyd fans may recognise one of Nat Tate's friends, whose photograph appears in the book: it is the legendary Logan Mountstuart, who would go on to star in Boyd's next novel, Any Human rating: 2/10. Not so much a scam as a brilliant benevolent wheeze. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List The actor David Niven is loved as much now for his series of memoirs as for his films. The books, starting with The Moon's a Balloon, are so full of perfect anecdotes that, as our reviewer put it, 'the stories are too perfect, too rounded, not to have been seriously embellished' — and documents released in 2002 put into question Niven's army career as presented in his book. But his reputation is undimmed, probably because these things matter less when the writing is so good and when the story tells us some deeper truth. The same goes for the Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who, as Neal Ascherson put it, 'was capable of inventing to make the truth even truer'. We tend to forgive these writers, just as Clive James did when he discovered that his beloved Italian essayist Eugenio Montale had got assistants to write many of his book reviews and split the payment. James was unperturbed: all he had discovered, he wrote, 'was that the demigod was a human being all along'.Pinocchio rating: 0/10. We forgive genius anything.
Times
20-06-2025
- 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.'
Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Corny, clichéd, lazy — James Frey's eat-the-rich novel is cynical tosh
James Frey boasts that it took him a mere 57 days to write Next to Heaven, a trashy murder-mystery set among the bored ultra-rich in Connecticut. This I can believe. There are books that gain a kinetic force from being composed in a feverish sprint and then there are books where you wonder if some hapless editor has sent the wrong draft to the printer. Next to Heaven feels less like a novel than notes for a novel, prompts even, almost as if Frey tossed together a few reference points — Bret Easton Ellis, Jackie Collins,Couples by John Updike — and asked a a certain large-language model to come up with the goods, although he swears blind he didn't use AI to write it. OK, he conceded to Vanity Fair magazine that he used ChatGPT to help with brand names; and it's impossible to avoid Google's AI these days. But on the creativity point he defended his integrity emphatically: 'I don't use generative AI to write ever, just so we're clear,' he said. I suppose we'll just have to take the author of A Million Little Pieces (2003) at his word. It's just that it reads almost uncannily like a cynical remix of any number of super-rich satires or thrillers we've been treated to in recent years. Like Liane Moriarty's novel Big Little Lies, the story is set in a 'picture perfect' small town. It features a gossipy Greek chorus narration and a heavily foreshadowed murder. There are frustrated cops, themes of domestic abuse and rape and an unlikely sisterhood, which given the tone of Frey's previous book, Katerina ('Cum inside me. Cum inside me. Cum inside me'), seems unlikely to have been born from any native feminist instinct. Then, like the recent TV drama Your Friends and Neighbors starring Jon Hamm, it features a Connecticut fund manager who gets fired, can't bring himself to tell his family and maintains his lavish lifestyle by pinching Patek Philippe watches from his neighbours. But, whatever. Aren't all these eat-the-rich stories about sex, divorce and murder merging into one anyway? And isn't shamelessness the quality Frey, 55, is best known for? He claims he dreamt of becoming 'the most controversial writer on the planet' — not the best, the most controversial. He shot to fame after his drugs memoir A Million Little Pieces was championed by Oprah Winfrey. It then emerged that he had invented large chunks of it. It brought controversy, a South Park parody, millions of sales and precisely zero contrition (as one of the characters in Next to Heaven thinks after she has duped everyone: 'Hahaha. It worked. Hahaha. Hahaha.') 'I grew up with a f*** you attitude,' this maverick has said in interviews, a phrase he puts in the mouth of many of his risk-taking, self-destructive characters. Katerina (2018) won a bad sex award and was described by one critic as 'an impressive attempt at career suicide'. And yet Frey seems to have failed even in this attempt because here he still is. Next to Heaven centres on a drug-fuelled sex party dreamt up by Devon and Belle, the richest two wives in chichi New Bethlehem (a name taken from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood). Devon, an art dealer who comes from old money, is looking to escape her marriage of convenience to Billy, a sadistic bitcoin billionaire with a portrait of Eric Trump on the wall. Belle, who hails from a family of rich criminals in Texas, lives in a property that's 'staffed the f*** up' with nannies, housekeepers and stable hands. Her gentle husband, Teddy, is impotent — unable to achieve 'a coconut-cream explosion'. • What we're reading this week — by the Times books team Devon craves sex with Alex, a former NFL quarterback who has lost his banking job but hasn't told his wholesome wife, Grace. Meanwhile, Belle wants to bed Charlie, a hockey coach, who is dating Katy, a maths teacher with a tragic backstory. All the women are beautiful with olive skin. Devon's beloved housekeeper, Ana, has particularly beautiful olive skin and must sleep with her boss to send money back to her husband and child in Costa Rica. So all the ingredients are here for another titillating tale of rape and retribution among the 1-per-centers complete with Chanel dresses, Boca do Lobo sofas, limited-edition Yeezys, Ode à la Rose orchids, Roche Bobois chairs etc. Next to Heaven confirms that Frey is a very, very lazy writer. His sentences read like schoolboy attempts at hardboiled style — 'He had it all. And he had always had it all' — and contain some of the corniest lines I've read in fiction ('promises are like glass and they break just as easily'). Then there are the parts where he takes flight: 'Oh the night! Oh the dark! Where promises are made and kisses exchanged, where secrets are born and shared, where hearts entwine and passions ignite.' Frey doesn't let editors touch a word of his — this I can also believe. What's particularly strange, given that he's such a 'bad boy', is that he completely fluffs the wife-swapping soirée. After one paragraph in which the men all size each other up, the characters slope off to have very tame (or depressing) heterosexual intercourse. James, goddammit, it's an orgy! He takes more care describing the party invitations. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List For a book about bad behaviour, the characters behave in remarkably boring and predictable ways. They have no foibles or contradictions. No one in the novel feels remotely real. The characters are dead, the language is dead and it says terrible things about publishing that this ever saw the light of day. It's also coming to a TV near you because Frey sold the screen rights before the manuscript — 'Hahaha. It worked. Hahaha. Hahaha.'Next to Heaven by James Frey (Swift £18.99 pp336). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Telegraph
19-06-2025
- 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.
