How to Catch a Literary Fraud: The Case of James Frey
A literary scholar’s analysis of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard before Frey’s fraud was publicly acknowledged.
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- Editor's Note
Content warning: This article contains mentions of rape and suicide.
This article was produced by the Observatory. It has been adapted from the following articles, all originally published on the eXile: “A Million Pieces of Shit,” May 29, 2003; “Frey’s Fairy Godfather,” September 9, 2005; and “The Plagiarism of James Frey Revealed: A Million Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” December 15, 2005.
Introduction[edit | edit source]
In 2003, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces was published, a lurid memoir of addiction and redemption at a rehabilitation clinic. Reviewers stressed Frey’s courage in telling such a harrowing personal story. Publisher Random House called it “brutally honest,” Salon “a fierce and honorable work that refuses to glamorize that author’s addiction or his thorny personality.” In 2005 it became an Oprah’s Book Club selection and she praised it for its authenticity, saying to a studio audience that she “couldn’t put [it] down… [it’s] a gut-wrenching memoir that is raw and it’s so real…” Largely thanks to her endorsement, it became the number-one paperback on Amazon and topped the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks straight.[1]
This adoration of Frey’s memoir puzzled me at the time of its initial reception because the writing was so god-awful. Not only that, but it was clear to me that Frey was lying. He told absurd fabrications about several worlds I knew well: drugs, sentimental literature, and contemporary American culture. And clearly, those lies were popular. I came at Frey’s work from a background in 18th-century literature of sentiment, and compared to the best examples of that genre, Frey’s novel seemed like belated, amateur stuff. I realized Frey’s real talent was one he shared with other forgers like James Macpherson, Joseph Smith, and Margaret B. Jones[2]: telling millions of readers what they wanted to believe—no matter how ridiculously implausible it was.
I want to stress that the three essays included here were published before Frey was officially outed as a fraud in January 2006. A Million Little Pieces came out in April 2003 and one month later I panned[3] it, mainly on literary grounds but also because at least one character was obviously fake (“Frey misses Lilly so much, so often, that you begin to suspect she didn’t exist”). In my September 2005 review[4] of Frey’s second novel, My Friend Leonard, I called him a liar. In December of the same year I wrote a piece[5] observing that Frey’s novels were remarkably similar in content to those of Eddie Little, but that Little could write. Then, in January 2006, the Smoking Gun published an article called “A Million Little Lies,”[6] showing that many crucial parts of both of Frey’s “memoirs” were completely made up.[7] Public outrage was so intense the publisher promised refunds[8] to disappointed readers, and Oprah not only expelled him[9] from her book club but also publicly confronted[10] him for lying.
Here are my articles on Frey in order of publication.
A Million Little Pieces[edit | edit source]
This essay by John Dolan originally appeared in the eXile as “A Million Pieces of Shit” on May 29, 2003.
This is the worst thing I’ve ever read.
A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security, and position and want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It’s a fitting literary metonymy for the early 21st century: the rich decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.
Frey sums up his entire life in one sentence from page 351 of this 382-page memoir: “I took money from my Parents and I spent it on drugs.” Given the simplicity and familiarity of the story, you might wonder what Frey does in the other 381 pages. The story itself is simple: he goes through rehab at an expensive private clinic, with his parents footing the bill. That’s it. Four hundred pages of hanging around a rehab clinic.
It feels longer. It feels like years.
For all Frey’s childish impersonation of the laconic Hemingway style, this is one of the most heavily padded pieces of prose I’ve seen since I stopped reading first-year student essays. Frey manages to puff up this simple story to book length thanks to one simple gimmick: he repeats. Repeats the beginnings of sentences. Repeats the beginnings of phrases. And the endings. Endings of phrases. Phrases and sentences.
And while his prose is repeating, his tale is descending. Descending into bathos. Bathos in which he wallows. Wallows. In bathos. Bathos, bathos, bathos.
The results can be quite funny, altogether unintentionally, as when Frey tries to dramatize the travails of love:
“I start crying again.
“Softly crying.
“I think of Lilly and I cry.
“It’s all I can do.
“Cry.”[11]
I found myself laughing every time I read this, imagining Daffy Duck doing the scene: “It’th all I can do!” then turning to the audience to clarify things: “Cry, that ith.”
Of all Frey’s repetitions, the most common is the conjunction “and.” It’s “and” after “and” after “and.” He seems to think he’s broken the transition problem right open. Every time he needs to connect two thoughts or actions, he simply plops an “and” between them.
This can work, when it’s done by somebody with talent—Frank O’Hara, for example. O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died” uses a breathless, self-centered narrative full of “and”s to contrast with the sudden stop when he learns of the death of Billie Holiday.
The trouble is that there’s no end, no variation, and no irony whatsoever in Frey’s awed, nonstop list of his every move, as in this gripping account of going to the dentist: “I go back to the Medical Unit and I find a Nurse and I tell her I have to go to the Dentist and she checks the outside appointment book and it checks and she sends me to a Waiting Room and I wait.”[12]
Frey has another stylistic tic almost as distracting as his conjunctions: he capitalizes some but not all nouns, making his would-be laconic, macho narrative look as if it had been dictated to Emily Dickinson on a day she’d been sipping laudanum. Lulled by the dull story, you drift into consideration of the pattern, if any, behind these capitalized nouns.
Walking on a trail outside the clinic, Frey names and capitalizes everything: “Trail,” “Tree,” “Animals.” Then he sees a lower-case “bird.”[13] I was offended on behalf of our feathered friend. Why don’t the birds get their caps like everybody else?
But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat brown otter”: “There is an Island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the Pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”[13]
Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver den!
Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the “fat… otter” is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:
“Hey, Fat Otter.
“He stares at me.
“You want what I got?
“He stares at me.
“I’ll give you everything.
“Stares at me…”[13]
And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should’ve slapped him with its “flat, armored tail” and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its “Pile with monstrous protrusions.”
But if you hit Frey, you would be in serious trouble. Not just because Frey’s dad is a filthy-rich international corporate lawyer, but because, as he never tires of informing the reader, Mister James Frey is one tough bastard. He gets in real fights, albeit only with moribund addicts twice his age.
Frey makes his bones on the mean corridors of his clinic by going through painful reconstructive dentistry without anesthetic. Because he’s an addict, he can’t even have local anesthetic (or so he claims). He goes through about 30 pages of what he calls, in his inimitable style, “Pain pain pain pain pain” in the dentist’s chair. He then totters back to his room unaided. After that, he is the baddest dude in the whole private clinic. He wins the respect of the very baddest of his fellow inmates, who become his best friends.
Guess who his new friends are. Go ahead, guess! I’ll give you a hint: just pick the most ludicrous clichés in American TV aimed at pubescent male audiences. Forget about subtlety. Imagine this novel was a screenplay by the dumb brother in Adaptation. Who would he pick for the hero’s friends?
Well, here are the guys who became Frey’s pals: Leonard, a highly placed Mafia killer from Las Vegas; Matty, a Black former world champion boxer; and Miles, a Black federal judge from New Orleans who plays the clarinet.
There they are, the most childish dreams of every little rich white boy: being down with the brothers and the Mafia. The tough guys. The Jazzmen. Having friends with connections in those two equally artificial cities, Vegas and New Orleans.
Frey makes other friends who are also straight out of central casting—like Ed, a steelworker from Detroit. Ed, like all these other walking clichés, turns out to have a soft, sentimental heart under his tough exterior: “Ed is a hard man. Big, strong, tough as the material he works with, and I have never seen him be vulnerable in any sense of the word, but as he talks of his Sons, his eyes get soft and wet.”
A steelworker who’s “tough as the material he works with”? I thought that sort of cliché died with Vachel Lindsay. But then Frey’s a very old-fashioned writer, who combines the homoerotic machismo of Hemingway with the sentimentality and syntax of Saroyan and Sandburg—a nasty mix, a soiled, archaic rich-boy populism.
Women are minor characters in the book, and the least-convincing passages of all are those in which Frey attempts to hint at a grand love affair in the past or tries to contrive a love interest with an addicted former prostitute, Lilly. Here’s the hymn to love with which he ends a chapter:
“I miss Lilly.
“I miss Lilly.
“I miss Lilly.”[14]
My reading of this passage is that he missed Lilly. But then I’m a trained literary critic. Other readers may have other, equally valid interpretations.
Frey misses Lilly so much, so often, that you begin to suspect she didn’t exist, and was added to the text to neutralize the lifelong homosexual panic in which this belated Norman Mailer finds himself. It’s a pity Frey never studied Wallace Stevens. If he had, he’d have known that the more times one repeats an assertion, the less convincing it becomes.
As his utterly unconvincing romance with Lilly progresses, Frey dives deeper and deeper into cliché: “I have fallen in love with a Girl, a beautiful and profoundly troubled Girl who is alone in the World…”[14] The man was born too late; he should have been writing subtitles for silent-film melodrama.
Sticking closely to silent-film formula, Frey (and I think caps are warranted here) Rescues the Girl. Now he is ready to go out and face the world.
But first, Leonard the mobster becomes Frey’s fairy godfather, announcing:
“I would like you [Frey] to be my Son. I will watch out for you as I would if you were my real Son, and I will offer you advice and help guide you through your life.”[15]
Frey’s tale of being adopted by a Mafia figure epitomizes the greed for notoriety, as decor, that drives this novel and its whole genre. Frey already has two trusting, devoted, wealthy parents. It’s their money and devotion that get him to the clinic in the first place. But when they come to visit him in the clinic, he’s furious. He can’t stand being around them. Frey claims to be puzzled at the intensity of his anger at his real parents, but it’s really very easy to understand. Mom and Dad have already given him what he requires of them: money, security, and the confidence to go slumming and then, when the time is right, to cash in on his Manhattan connections to become famous.
By visiting him in the middle of his street-cred-winning campaign, Frey’s parents threaten to ruin the whole con. Rehab, for trust-fund druggies like Frey, is a place to be born again, as the son of cool Mafia dons and the trusted friend of serious Black guys. Having Mom show up and hug you right in front of them is worse than Mom dropping you off at the prom.
Luckily, Daddy has to take off for Brazil, and Frey can return to bizarrely detailed descriptions of every single hug and tearful farewell between him and his new pals.
And I mean detailed. It takes Leonard and his new son three pages just to get out to the limo. And there, of course, there must be another maudlin goodbye, stretched to absurd length. Anyone else would’ve said, “We hugged and said goodbye,” but Frey takes you through every step of the process, padding his bathos as if explaining “hug” to a Martian:
“Leonard steps forward. He puts his arms around me and he hugs me. I put my arms around him and I hug him. He lets go and he steps away and he looks in my eyes and he speaks.”[15]
And even after the blow-by-blow account of the big hug, it’s not over, because of course there must be another macho-yet-tearful farewell:
“Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity…
“I look back. In his eyes.
“I’ll miss you, Leonard.
“We’ll see each other soon, my Son.
“I nod. I force myself not to cry.”[15]
Frey and his tough-guy friends spend more time weeping and hugging than the runners-up in a Miss America competition. Frey’s aggressively male stance has something archaic, even campy about it. Frey has placed the entire book in a gender-segregated institution, recalling Hemingway’s title Men Without Women (male patients are not allowed to say anything more than “Hello” to female patients in Frey’s rehab center). And like most homoerotic novelists of the 1930s, his true period, Frey resorts to violence to prove he’s no homosexual, confessing (that is to say, boasting) that he beat a French priest to death for daring to place his hand on Frey’s utterly masculine thigh.
Frey ticks off the entire Hemingway shopping list, including boxing and impotence (which Frey blames, of course, on the drugs, the drugs, the terrible drugs). He goes on at great length about the importance of watching a title fight, which makes him and his fellow rehab patients feel like “men.”
With Lilly and the gay-bashing story in place to reassure the reader that Frey is a man’s man, Frey feels free to devote the last third of the book to protracted and lachrymose farewells. Frey, who’s now the toughest and most beloved guy in the whole rehab clinic, says goodbye to all his streety friends—dorm warden, the clarinet-playing roommate, then his counselor and her tough yet sensitive fisherman boyfriend—in minute detail with many a sniffle and hug.
Then it’s time to take the bags out to the car and meet Frey’s brother, who’s come to take him home. Guess what they do first! Yeah: they hug: “He hugs me. I hug him.” It’s these sudden twists that make Frey’s story such a page-turner.
And so, like a child returning to his nice warm bed, Frey returns to the privileged world that has supported him all through his life. His rehab friends, of course, cannot. After all, they’re authentic, and their authenticity means they have to die violent drug-related deaths in order to validate the streety credentials this rich brat has won in the clinic. They must die so he can strut.
My Friend Leonard[edit | edit source]
This essay by John Dolan originally appeared in the eXile as “Frey’s Fairy Godfather” on September 9, 2005.
James Frey is a liar. A bad one. And hugely successful.
His second memoir, My Friend Leonard, is much, much worse than A Million Little Pieces. Seriously. At least A Million Little Pieces had that whole rehab thing going for it, with the built-in suspense: will little Jimmy stay straight-’n’-sober, or will he return to the drugs, the drugs, O the terrible drugs?
In his new memoir, that bit of dramatic suspense is gone. We all know Frey stays sober, because he already told us that. So My Friend Leonard slogs doggedly through Frey’s extraordinarily dull post-rehab life on the wagon. It never seems to cross his mind that the drugs were the only interesting thing about him.
Frey’s dullness is so complete it’s downright eerie. There really is something wrong with this guy. He wanders from Chicago to Los Angeles, noticing nothing. He takes a job as a Mafia delivery boy (or so he claims), and notices nothing. He becomes a film writer, producer, and director without remarking on any of the quirks or verbal habits of Hollywood insiders.
His only concern is to find ways to jerk tears out of his readers. When he brings someone onstage, you can be sure they’ll die in a hackneyed, melodramatic manner within a few pages. Take his dog-buying story. He buys a pit bull from some gangbangers who boast that its sire was “Cholo, undefeated champion” of East LA, but claims to be surprised when it grows up to be vicious. Yes, in spite of the fact that the puppy’s sire is actually snarling at Jim when he buys the pup, straining at the wire to tear the idiot gringo apart, it doesn’t dawn on him that there might be a few behavioral problems down the line.
He comes to love the puppy. We know this because he tells us so. Frey has never been shy about bathos. He describes the dog as “my little boy, my mister big man, my best buddy.” Aw. Then again, he names the pit bull “Cassius,” as in Cassius Clay. Uh, Jim, doesn’t that imply that you sort of knew the dog might get a little aggressive? As so often in assessing post-Reagan culture, you’re left to wonder whether you’re dealing with stupidity, lies, or some horribly adaptive mixture of both.
What glues all Frey’s lies together into a tasty patty are his boo-hoo scenes. The sort of thing that flourished in the later stages of 18th-century novels of sentiment, where the whole point of the surface narrative was to take the reader as quickly as possible from one stylized lachrymose tableau to the next.
The pit bull is just like every other character in this novel: it only appears so Frey can kill it off, giving his readers another good cry. The dog’s death is typical: the story is stripped of all detail so that Frey can get to the death scene as fast as possible. So despite his endless professions of love for his “best buddy,” he agrees to have Cassius put to death as soon as his vet recommends a golden shot. That seemed a little weird to me. Most people I know would have to think it over. Not Jim. But it’s okay, because Jim cries as the dog is being killed. That’s all that matters, the crying:
“I don’t want to accept the vet’s opinion, but I know he’s right. I look down at Cassius[16] he’s still sitting at my feet, I start to cry. He senses something is wrong he wants to make me feel better he starts licking my face. I put my arms around him and I cry and I tell him I love him, I love him so much…”[17]
And then, with no pesky delay or details, it’s off to the killing room: “The vet prepares the needle. I hold Cassius and I tell him over and over that I love him and that I’ll miss him and he kisses me, kisses me, kisses me…” No wonder Frey’s best friend is in the Mafia—the kiss of death comes naturally to him.
I admit, it gives me the creeps—and I wrote my dissertation on Sade. I can take nearly anything, but describing in this way killing your dog to satisfy your readers?—that’s what I call sick.
And scary. If Frey ever told me that he loved me—not that that’s very likely—I’d be extremely nervous. I’d be afraid he needed another chapter: “I tell Dolan I love him and hug him and stick a knife in his back and give it a good twist and he gurgles and says, ‘Sorry about those reviews; do you think you could get me to an emergency room?’ and I push his body off the pier and I cry. I cry and cry and cry.”
In fashioning his melodramatic subplots, Frey has learned a great secret: you can’t lay it on too thick.
Consider the first character to get killed off in this mess: Lilly, Frey’s alleged girlfriend from the first novel. Even her name summons up the heroines of silent film. And her story would have had ’em reaching for the hankies a hundred years ago: sold into white slavery by her harlot mother! A slave to drink and drugs! Drawn to her old ways, Lilly flees rehab but is rescued at the last moment by our hero!
That was how we left Lilly in Frey’s last episode, I mean “memoir.” Now, we learn that she’s at a halfway house in Chicago, spending every day at the bedside of her dying grandmother—her only decent relative! Meanwhile, Frey is in jail, paying for his drug-fueled crimes!
What will happen if Lilly, bereft of all hope, must face her grandmother’s death before being reunited with Frey? Will our hero make it in time? You can guess how it turns out. Just think of the crudest, lamest plot cliché you can come up with. That’s what Frey’s going to do.
You can see why Frey was such a hit in Hollywood. There’s something cinematic, in the very corniest sense, about his story. Naturally, Lillyʼs beloved grandma dies just 12 short hours before Frey is released. It’s just a question of time now, as Frey rushes to succor poor Lilly. If this was a movie—and god knows it will be—you’d see the Frey-character at the wheel of his truck, speeding—nay, hurtling!—toward Chi-town, with that image superimposed on a map, where a line moves slowly—oh, so slowly!—from North Carolina toward Illinois. Then we’d cut to Lilly, her lustrous raven tresses sprawled across Grandma’s bed, weeping! Then back to Frey at the wheel! Then back to Lilly, walking like one drained of all hope into her lonely room! Back to Frey, speeding—but the dot on the map advances so slowly! Then back to Lilly, as she takes the towel from her bathroom—No, Lilly, no! Don’t do it! Your rescuer is near at hand!
And of course, it would end with Lilly’s feet swinging back and forth in midair. That was the point, of course: killing her off fast. For one thing, Frey is utterly hopeless with female characters, and Lilly is the worst of all.
When the beloved gets killed off, Frey lays it on thick and hot:
“I run my hands along the top of her head and through her hair.
“I cry.
“I feel the contours of her face.
“I kiss my fingers and I press them to her lips.
“I cry.
“She is quiet.
“Calm.
“Still.
“At rest.
“I take her hand beneath the sheet. It is stiff and cold. I take her hand.
“I am with her.
“I hold her.
“I love her.
“She’s at rest.
“Cry.”[18]
That last one-word paragraph would seem to be an instruction to the reader: “Cry, damn it! What are you waiting for? I already repeated the damn verb three times!”
Not that Frey is a man to skimp on repetitions. In the true tradition of sentimental fiction, he signals the tear-releasing moment in the simplest and most direct way possible: by repeating the word “cry” until even the densest reader gets the point.
The best thing about killing off Lilly is that Frey can cry over and over about her death. He’s not wasteful that way—he squeezes every ounce of salt water out of her. For instance, naturally Leonard, his fairy Mafia godfather, finds out about Lilly hanging herself, which means he and Frey have to hug again. Frey can stretch an ordinary hug into a whole chapter, so this is nothing for him. He could write this one in his sleep. He may have, actually:
“[Leonard] motions me forward.
“Come here.
“I step toward Leonard, he steps toward me. He opens his arms and he puts them around me.
“I’m sorry for your loss.
“I start to speak, but I can’t.
“I’m so sorry.
“I start to cry.
“He hugs me.
“I start to cry.”[19]
You longtime Frey fans will note all the master’s usual touches here, especially the clinical precision in his description of the hug. The word “hug” comes a close second to “cry” in the Frey formula, and he never fails to make sure you get every detail, as in that classic of clarity, “I step toward Leonard, he steps toward me.” Y’all got that? In other words, they sort of stepped toward each other. We need to be clear about this.
The all-time high for a Frey fan is when you can get “hug” and “cry” together, twirling ’round one after the other, as in the passage above—a real kick, like a speedball, only legal.
And the fun’s not over. No sooner has that chapter ended—before Frey’s hyperventilating readers have even had time to wipe the tears off their cheeks—than it’s time for another cry-fest. You can’t have too much of a good thing, Frey reasons. So he starts his next chapter with what works for him:
“I cry.
“In the shower.
“As I brush my teeth.
“As I get dressed.
“Cry.”[20]
God, I look forward to seeing the CliffsNotes version of this novel: Theme: This is a novel about hugging and crying. Contents: Chapter One. The protagonist cries. Chapter Two. The protagonist hugs Leonard, and they both cry. Chapter Three. The protagonist takes a shower and cries… Lilly, once she’s dead, is the gift that keeps on giving. Because there’s her grave to visit, after all. You wouldn’t want to skip that! Frey, Leonard, and Leonard’s bodyguard “Snapper” make a visit to the cemetery to watch Lilly push up the daisies:
“I look at Leonard, tears are streaming down his face. He speaks.
“They’re [Lilly’s and her grandmother’s headstones are] beautiful.
“Yeah.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.
“I nod, start to tear up.”[20]
Of course, Lilly’s gravesite is only a teaser for the big tear-jerk, the death of the title character, Leonard. Leonard is Jimmy’s mentor and magical protector, always there to give him $30,000 or hug him or intimidate bullies who pick on little Jimmy. But then Leonard vanishes and when Jimmy finds him, Leonard is dying of AIDS in San Francisco. Leonard is gay! Oh, what bathos ensues! Naturally Leonard has to die, and naturally there’s—you guessed it: hugging and crying. At this point, near the end of the book, Frey has discovered another way to squeeze more pathos out of every word: his chapters consist of a single, brief paragraph per page. Here’s a sample, so intense that it gets a page to itself:
“Freddie [Leonard’s caregiver] brings me food I can hardly eat. He takes Bella [Frey’s surviving dog] for walks. When it gets dark, I get out of the car [sic] go inside. I step through the door I start crying again I walk straight up to my room I lie in bed and I cry.”[21]
Let’s just close the bedroom door and let Frey have a good cry while we consider the question of truth in his story. First of all, Frey’s stories depend on reader belief. If they’re not true, they’re fake sob stories. Don’t try to tell me about “fiction” and “suspension of disbelief”; I literally wrote the book on that subject. So truth matters, more than any other consideration, in these “memoirs.”
And I have this funny feeling that there is no truth in them at all.
Frey’s Plagiarism Is Adaptive[edit | edit source]
This essay by John Dolan originally appeared in the eXile as “The Plagiarism of James Frey Revealed: A Million Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on December 15, 2005.
Was James Frey ever a junkie? The more I look into this fraud, the more cunning fakery I find. Thanks to a book loaned to me by a friend, I now think Frey stole all the drug details he put in his hit novel, A Million Little Pieces. If he went to rehab, I’m betting it was for good ol’ booze, with maybe a cocaine chaser.
As for the absurd cornucopia of drugs he lists on his bad-boy CV in A Million Little Pieces—well, I suspect that is simply a lie. Frey even includes glue in his list. A rich boy like him using glue?
That’s just a lie. Nobody but the very dregs of the dregs use that poison, except perhaps masochists with a yen for violent nausea and headaches. If Frey’s faking his past, then his role in reinforcing drug-user stereotypes, providing the rubes with new proof that drugs equal addiction equals death, is even sleazier than if he was just a junkie peddling streety anecdotes.
Frey got those anecdotes the no-risk way: he stole them from a real druggie/criminal author. A much better and more honest one, a guy named Eddie Little who wrote two memoirs, Another Day in Paradise (1997) and Steel Toes (2001). Reading them, I’m amazed by his talent and by the brazen, obvious rip-off of his books Frey got away with. Frey’s a classic example of cunning stupidity; there’s a very effective method to his thefts from Little. He takes the tone and basic plots of Little’s stories and then flips all the grim details into happy fantasies.
I owe my friend Ruth for handing me Little’s novels. I’d never heard of them when she suggested I check them out. If you think truth in writing is rewarded by fame and money, that might seem weird, because Little was not only a much better writer than Frey but also unquestionably the real thing. I say “was” because Eddie Little died the way real addicts/criminals do: he ODed in a sleazy Los Angeles hotel room in 1998. That’s authenticity, the kind you pay for.
Little wrote a column called “Outlaw L.A.” that ran when Frey was living in LA writing bad movies (e.g., Kissing a Fool). I think Ruth’s hunch was right: Frey, like the thief and conman he is, read Little’s column, then his book, and started stealing. Naturally, he cut the key element of Little’s books—the unhappy endings—and added the fake transformations suckers demand.
Another lie, those transformations; people live and die as unvaryingly as insects. Frey himself illustrates this perfectly. He was a yuppie schemer from birth, a trust-fund bum with a roof rat’s adaptive, though repellent traits: a rat cunning and lack of shame.
These qualities happen to be the key to success in the U.S.: voilà Frey embracing Oprah. “But he’s a big hit!” That’s what Frey’s fans have been telling me, echoing a vile proverb: “You can’t argue with success.”
Which is utter crap. You damn well better argue with success, or accept suckerdom. If Kiss sold a thousand albums for every one the Velvet Underground did, they’re better?
Frey succeeded by using a cheap oxymoron: streety grime with a happy ending. Impossible, fake, wildly popular. Like Kiss, or E.T.
Frey’s fans seem to care only about his street creds, so this might be a blow. It’s weird the way they ignore the issue of his worth as a writer. They don’t even seem to have the notion that it matters whether a book is good or bad. If these readers cared about quality, maybe Eddie Little, whose prose is great—fast, funny, scary, and full of weird, sick detail—might have been the one to get rich.
Frey’s version of the drug world is false in every way. But it’s a nice right-wing lie, so his readers are happy. He assures us that indeed, drugs equal addiction equals rehab or death. Which is utter, absolute nonsense.
Here’s a stat to prove it: in 2005 Italian pollution officials checked levels of chemicals in the Po River, which drains most of northern Italy.[22] They discovered there was so much cocaine residue in the water that the residents of the area had to be using coke at more than twice the rate cops had estimated. It meant that every young adult in the place was coked out, every weekend. Two relevant facts: northern Italy in 2005 was virtually crime-free. The only gangs around were Albanian immigrants trying to make a little money, and they weren’t the coked-up partygoers whose piss was getting the river so high (lots of talkative, gung-ho fishies in the Po, I bet).
Second key fact: coke is actually one of the more dangerous drugs, almost as bad as alcohol.
Combine these facts and stats and you see that a. there are far more drug users than we admit out there; and b. they’re doing fine, holding jobs, raising kids, snorting on the weekends and trooping back to work like the rest of us. They just have a better time on the weekends than you booze-suckers.
Since Frey knows nothing about drugs and cares nothing for truth, he opts for the most lurid, criminal version of druggie life. He knows pious hypocrites love that stuff and so I believe he stole Little’s stories, carefully leaving out all the good parts.
When Little describes sniffing glue in youth prison, Frey, too naive and stupid to realize Little and friends resorted to this horrible poison because nothing else but Pruno was available, appears to simply steal the noun and include glue in his fake list of drugs abused—a sure sign for middle-class druggie readers like me that he was a lying fool, because nobody with access to decent drugs would touch that stuff.
Even Frey’s celebrated dental ordeal, in which he loses his front teeth and endures a root canal without anesthesia (another lie, of course) seems lifted from Little’s second novel, in which Eddie has his teeth bashed out with a steel bar in a racial brawl in prison. Little doesn’t even mention the pain; it’s not exotic in his world. Only for someone like Frey is pain remote enough to be eroticized.
But crude mistakes like that never hurt Frey. Like many stupid people, he had cunning enough to more than compensate for his lack of integrity and brains.
In fact, in order to understand what made Frey a hit and Little just another dead junkie, it’s worth taking a close look at how Frey transformed Little’s books into dreck that Oprah could love. Consider, then, the likely adaptation of the first chapter in Little’s second novel, Steel Toes, into the opening chapter of Frey’s second novel, My Friend Leonard.
Steel Toes opens with Little in a Midwestern prison for young criminals—a “gladiator school,” as he calls it. My Friend Leonard opens with Frey in prison. Little is in solitary after a failed escape attempt, so he has plenty of time to remember his girlfriend Rosie “dying from pain and a life of abuse and infection.” Frey takes that one-paragraph flash of grief and turns it into a truly comical Whitmanesque anaphora on Lilly, his (fake) dead prostitute lover:
“Lilly with long black hair and pale skin and blue eyes like deep, clean water. Lilly whose father deserted her and whose mother sold Lilly’s body for drugs when she was thirteen. Lilly who became a crackhead and a pillpopper and hitchhiked across the country on her back so that she could escape her Mother. Lilly who has been raped…”[23]
It likely wouldn’t occur to Eddie Little to make that sort of story into a lyric poem. He’d seen it. It wasn’t lyrical to him.
Compare Frey’s stories with Little’s and you’ll see this. Little generates horror and triumph without resorting to tear-jerking; Frey zooms to the weepy scenes, too ignorant to fake the details he doesn’t know and too cynical to care about filling in his crude narrative.
Here’s Little in actual prison, from his first novel Another Day in Paradise:
“I’m sitting in my bunk with my tray when three blacks roll on me. I’ve been waiting for a confrontation. There’s no way to do time without having at least one. The hillbillies are watching to see how it goes down, the bikers are in their normal corner, and the other Negroes are getting louder, anticipating watching a white boy get beat down…
“The sound of blood rushing through my head like a flooding river fills my ears, then the tunnel vision starts and my body begins shaking and, like magic, I don’t care if I get killed, crippled, or maimed. The only thing that exists is hurting these motherfuckers as bad as I can before they take me out.
“I throw the sandwich on the floor and step on it. Spit into my tray and then drop it, saying, ‘You bad motherfuckers gonna take my food?’ And kick the tray at them. ‘There it is, looks good, huh?’
“The tray smashes into the big one’s legs and it’s on. I’m swinging as hard and fast as I can while getting beat back into the wall.
“Going down but kicking and managing to head-butt one of ’em, trying to fight my way back up cause once you’re down that’s it, time for the boots to go to work. Terror slams enough adrenaline into my system to get my feet planted for a minute.
“There’s not enough room for them to really fuck me up, all three of ’em are trying to get in punches and blocking each other more than they’re hitting me, and I’m still winging shots at ’em but not doing much good.”[24]
Little focuses on racial hatred as the central fact of prison life, insisting on the truth he experienced (in Steel Toes): “[In prison y]ou stay with your own. Color lines are as solid as the penitentiary steel that surrounds us. You eat with, get loaded with, exercise, gamble, live and die with your own. Cross those lines and you’re out of the car, roadkill.”[25] Little comes close to an apostrophe to his fantasy-addicted liberal readers in insisting on the fact of racial hatred in prison:
“This is the way it is. “If you crave martyrdom, sit at the wrong table, you’ll get your cross, crown of thorns, thrown in for free.”[26]
Now guess what Frey does with Little’s honest treatment of race. And remember, the key to understanding Frey is that he realized you can’t lay it on too thick for an audience addicted to silly fantasies.
Well, no matter what you guessed, you probably underestimated the sheer schmaltz, the stinking cheese, of Frey’s narrative. On the first page of My Friend Leonard, on Frey’s first day in prison, he’s clobbered by a 300-pound Black inmate named Porterhouse. Yet by page 2, Frey and the hulking thug are best buds.[27]
Every single detail of their courtship is wrong, in a very adaptive way. First, that name, “Porterhouse.” The guy tells Frey he calls himself that because “he’s big and juicy like a fine-ass steak.” That’s such utter, patronizing, “Jeffersons”-style blaxploitation crap that the fact not one reviewer objected to it tells you Frey was right: to be a bestseller, play it down to sitcom level.
Porterhouse’s backstory displays cliché violence against women: he threw his wife out of a seventh-floor window for fucking another man, then took the man to a vacant lot and blew his arms and legs off with a shotgun and then “waited thirty minutes to let the man feel the pain of the shots, pain he said was equivalent to the pain he felt when he saw the man fucking his wife.”
I guess that’s love, for you “normal” people.
Once again I want to smack myself for thinking that I, with my pitiful Sadean fantasies, was the sick one. You decent people go way, way past my kind, and still think you’re the salt of the earth. It reminds me of one of Eddie Little’s excellent Raymond Chandler–style similes, when he describes a sky “as clear as a moron’s conscience.”[28]
Frey swaggers further into patronizing fantasy when he learns that Porterhouse is illiterate. Frey spends the rest of his time in prison reading to his “big and juicy” friend, introducing the poor Black man to what he considers great literature. I can’t resist quoting Frey’s account of the process in full:
“I read slowly and clearly, taking an occasional break to drink a glass of water or smoke a cigarette. In the past twelve weeks we have worked our way through Don Quixote, Leaves of Grass, and East of Eden. We are currently reading War and Peace, which is Porterhouse’s favorite. He smiled at the engagement of Andrei and Natasha. He cried when Anatole betrayed her. He cheered at the battle of Borodino, and though he admired the Russian tactics, he cursed while Moscow burned. When we’re not reading, he carries War and Peace around with him. He sleeps with it at night, cradles it as if it were his child. He says that if he could, he would read it again and again.”[23]
Amazing, isn’t it? Just try to list the lies, treacle, and condescending bullshit in that paragraph—Porterhouse comes across as Frey’s own Koko the talking gorilla. Just typing it out forces me to confront these lies in detail, and I realize it’s impossible to blame Frey very much for his own popularity.
He gave his readers more than enough clues to realize he was a complete fraud. Nobody with an ounce of sense, with a trace of integrity or the slightest attachment to reality, could have read that paragraph and continued to believe. Even the list of great books begs you to call its bluff! Every one of those books is in the class of unreadable classics. I’ve spent my life reading and yet never managed to get past the first chapter of Don Quixote. Comedy has a short shelf life, and what wowed ’em in Castile a few centuries back is now paper pulp.
And Leaves of Grass? Oh, come on! Ah, but the crowning lie is that Porterhouse loved War and Peace. Again, this is the old noble savage, cultural virgin myth. Ever try to make somebody read that book? Unless they’re Slavic majors, they can’t even get the names straight, and unless they’re born phonies they’ll admit they’d rather have six root canals on a time-dilating drug than be forced to slog to the end with that “moralizing infant” Tolstoy.
Compare outcomes: Little paid for his knowledge of junkie-dom and died a junkie’s death; Frey seems to have stolen Little’s scars, tears, and knowledge; skipped the weird stuff; and sold us a cut-and-paste tale of tears ending with redemption, a hymn with a lot of curse words to cut the treacly taste. That’s a classic Hollywood trick, you know: when a screenwriter doesn’t know the streety world he’s trying to write, he just puts in a “fuck” every three words. It’s a cheap spray-paint version of local color, and the suckers don’t mind as long as they get that fake happy ending, that Kenny Rogers redemption, at the end.
My beef with James Frey’s fans stems from the fact that Eddie Little’s book could have been the more deserving object of their (and Oprah’s) adulation.
These fans had a stake, something to lose, in Frey’s scam. It was their only chance to feel those human-type emotions left behind in real life, stolen emotions that somebody else had to pay for. A couple of Kleenex and they were back at work, indifferent to the misery that pervades our country.
Eddie Little wouldn’t; no Oprah or legion of adoring lady fans for Eddie. Little died an honest man’s honest death, something to be abhorred by the suckers.
The received wisdom is that all drugs except booze are killers. The thing is, everyone knows that’s a lie. Or they could know, if they had any attraction to truth at all. They could recall the people they grew up with. They’d find the ones from solid families went on to solid lives, and the ones who were fucked-up stayed that way, and drugs had nothing to do with either outcome. The kids in my world used more drugs than Frey has ever taken. Contrary to the Frey melodrama version, the planet is full of hardworking, law-abiding, middle-aged druggies.
If Little got his drugs from a Park Avenue doctor the way the rich do, he wouldn’t have ODed on heroin. But that’s what we believe, after all: you can’t argue with success, or, by logical extension, with failure. Little failed and died. Frey is America’s sweetheart and patron swine—his druggie past as fake as everything else in his books. And Prohibition keeps killing thousands every year, with the help of Frey’s Nancy Reagan lies about “addiction.” The man’s rottenness has no bounds; he has the smell of a future president about him.
- ↑ Wikipedia. “A Million Little Pieces.”
- ↑ Dolan, John. “How Literary Frauds Strike Again… and Again.” The Observatory, March 2025.
- ↑ Dolan, John. “A Million Pieces of Shit.” The eXile, May 29, 2003.
- ↑ Dolan, John. “Frey’s Fairy Godfather.” The eXile, September 9, 2005.
- ↑ Dolan, John. “The Plagiarism of James Frey Revealed: A Million Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” The eXile, December 15, 2005.
- ↑ Smoking Gun, The. “A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction.” January 4, 2006.
- ↑ From the Smoking Gun: “According to a February 2003 New York Observer story by Joe Hagan, Frey originally tried to sell the book as a fictional work, but the Talese imprint ‘declined to publish it as such.’ A retooled manuscript, presumably with all the fake stuff excised, was published in April 2003 amid a major publicity campaign.”
- ↑ Glaister, Dan. “Million Little Pieces May Cost Publishers Millions in Refunds.” The Guardian. September 8, 2006.
- ↑ Wyatt, Edward. “Author Is Kicked Out of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.” The New York Times. January 27, 2006.
- ↑ Silverman, Stephen M. “Oprah Confronts Author James Frey.” People. January 26, 2006.
- ↑ Frey, James (2009). A Million Little Pieces, ebook, John Murray. Ch. 16.
- ↑ Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. Ch. 7.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. Ch. 10.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. Ch. 17.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. Ch. 19.
- ↑ Run-on sentences abound in the original text.
- ↑ Frey, James (2005). My Friend Leonard, ebook, Riverhead Books. Ch. 85.
- ↑ Frey, James. My Friend Leonard. Ch. 6.
- ↑ Frey, James. My Friend Leonard. Ch. 10.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 Frey, James. My Friend Leonard. Ch. 11.
- ↑ Frey, James. My Friend Leonard. Ch. 97.
- ↑ Leahy, Stephen. “Rivers of Coke.” Wired. August 5, 2005.
- ↑ 23.0 23.1 Frey, James. My Friend Leonard. Ch. 1.
- ↑ Little, Eddie (1998). Another Day in Paradise. New York, NY: Viking. Pp. 255–256.
- ↑ Little, Eddie (2001). Steel Toes. New York, NY: LA Weekly for St. Martin’s Press. P. 11.
- ↑ Little, Eddie. Steel Toes. Pp. 11–12.
- ↑ Frey, James (2005). My Friend Leonard. Pp. 1–2.
- ↑ Little, Eddie. Steel Toes. P. 58.
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