Oprah's apology and stir Frey

(Really, t he big news here is that Frey is pronounced "fry"... ) Admit it, it feels good. She's admitting she was wrong. And there's nothing wrong with feeling high-and-mighty about it. So long as, you know, you don't discount the more basic human urges as "undesirable".... So Oprah has vivisected Frey on her show and exacted revenge on behalf of the little people she lead into literature's Viet Iraq. Who do you think her audience supports? The guy's not even a recovering crackhead. He's a wanna be crackhead. That's more Jerry Springer than it is Oprah. How droll. You know, the more I read about it, the more I'm starting to feel the bastard was himself duped by cash-hungry publishing types eager to fit him in the genre-du-jour. I mean, he DID try to sell it as fiction... Not excusing it, just pointing it out. Another opinion here.


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I'm looking forward to the book "My Friend Oprah" by James Frey. That's gonna kick ass!

You know, the duplicity of this situation sickens me, but
if you look up Frey's book on Amazon and read through the review excerpts, it's clear that this guy can write. Would the reviewers have been so lavish with their praise if they'd been reading a fiction? That seems unclear to me, since so much of their praise (at least in the excerpts) hinges on style and voice.

Makes one wonder whether this was all a carefully orchestrated campaign to get him the attention he deserves. If it bleeds, it leads...maybe he felt any embarrassment would be worth the press it would fetch him.

The Frey Incident: Chapter 157

One would think the thermonuclear strike known as The Frey Incident (a new Sidney Sheldon novel) should be winding down. But it seems the shockwaves are just starting to be felt in some circles. I believe this is called "impact" and this is called a "blast radius". And this is called "fallout". And this is called "containment". And this is called "half-life". And this is called "nuclear winter".


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cfg: really? All the excerpts I've seen make it seem like he can't write at all. All his stylistic differences seem totally trite or boring and nothing has been memorable from the excerpts I've read except their stupidy (eg, calling a beaver a "fat otter with an armored tail")

Edited by author 01-30-2006 11:17 AM
What seems clear is that the critics think he can write, which is what I said. Take a wander over to Amazon and take a look at what they're praising. It's not "emotional truth," that's for sure.

Man I got no idea what you are talking about.
Most of the reviews by actual critics I've seen were really negative about the writing and there are a TON of amazon reviews dissing the writing.

For example, from amazon.com:

From Publishers Weekly
Frey is pretender to the throne of the aggressive, digressive, cocky Kings David: Eggers and Foster Wallace. Pre-pub comparisons to those writers spring not from Frey's writing but from his attitude: as a recent advance profile put it, the 33-year-old former drug dealer and screenwriter "wants to be the greatest literary writer of his generation." While the Davids have their faults, their work is unquestionably literary. Frey's work is more mirrored surface than depth, but this superficiality has its attractions. With a combination of upper-middle-class entitlement, street credibility garnered by astronomical drug intake and PowerPoint-like sentence fragments and clipped dialogue, Frey proffers a book that is deeply flawed, too long, a trial of even the most na‹ve reader's credulousness-yet its posturings hit a nerve. This is not a new story: boy from a nice, if a little chilly, family gets into trouble early with alcohol and drugs and stays there. Pieces begins as Frey arrives at Hazelden, which claims to be the most successful treatment center in the world, though its success rate is a mere 17%. There are flashbacks to the binges that led to rehab and digressions into the history of other patients: a mobster, a boxer, a former college administrator, and Lilly, his forbidden love interest, a classic fallen princess, former prostitute and crack addict. What sets Pieces apart from other memoirs about 12-stepping is Frey's resistance to the concept of a higher power. The book is sure to draw criticism from the recovery community, which is, in a sense, Frey's great gimmick. He is someone whose problems seem to stem from being uncomfortable with authority, and who resists it to the end, surviving despite the odds against him. The prose is repetitive to the point of being exasperating, but the story, with its forays into the consciousness of an addict, is correspondingly difficult to put down.


This is a pretty typical review. The story is interesting and makes you feel for the author since he really went through it (or we though he did) but the prose is shitty.

In fact, "emotional truth" is a pretty good term for what PW is praising in the story there. It sure aint the prose.

Gosh. I used to dream about being discovered by Nan Talese. In fact I still do. ;)