Whose Fault Is Frey?

By John Dolan, AlterNet. Posted January 17, 2006.

Who gets the blame when a con man robs the congregation blind? That's the real question in the case of James Frey.

Frey was nobody a few years back, a hack screenwriter whose best-known credit was an obscure romance movie with the weirdly prescient title “Loving A Fool.” That changed suddenly in 2003, when his debut rehab memoir “A Million Little Pieces” (2003) was published -- after being rejected by 17 publishers, who all deserve medals for service to literature.

AMLP was a huge success, with copies of it disappearing faster than cocaine at an advertising company's Christmas party. Amazon named it "Best Book of the Year." Frey's follow-up, “My Friend Leonard” (2005) was even worse than a AMLP, a thing I would not have thought possible, and almost as successful. A few months ago came the high-water mark of Frey's fame, when he went on Oprah and was welcomed as a saint of self-help, a paragon of romance and a literary genius.

Then, just a few days ago, Frey fell. The Smoking Gun website published an exposé detailing all the lies and exaggerations in Frey's boasts about his bad-boy past. It turned out that Frey's total prison time amounts to a few hours, and his crimes were what you'd expect of a frat boy, infractions involving beer and cars.

The reaction was fast and violent. America, a nation that often behaves like a congregation, was outraged, as if the preacher had been found in the wrong bed on Sunday morning.

Although I understand their shock, I can't share their indignation. As a former academic who's written extensively on reader belief and forgery in literature, I've come to realize that it's the audiences who create forgeries like Frey's. Audiences who fall for this kind of forgery usually know better; they buy the fake because it confirms beliefs that are seen as fragile. Forgers count on that and happily rake in the cash and the adoration in return for shoring up shaky tribal myths.

Frey did exactly that for his readers, his "true" story reinforcing their belief that drugs = evil, that people are transformed in midlife, and that the individual can do miracles. In other words, Frey did a favor for a very mixed-up set of audiences, from DEA creeps to fans of Hollywood love stories, to wavering followers of self-help manuals.

So there's much more at stake here than a literary dispute. In fact, one of the more striking aspects of the current Frey debate is that Frey's fans don't care about literary quality one way or another. After two years of squabbling with these people online, I know what matters to them. Aesthetes they are most definitely not. What they valued was the moral of Frey's story, and the bad-boy bio authenticating it.

When that crumbled, nobody thought he was a good writer anymore. This too is typical of response to literary fraud; as long as the faked background of the book is believed true, the book is praised as magnificent. Once the readers know its grimy, self-serving origins, nobody sees any merit in it anymore. English professors may invoke that very slippery term, "fiction," saying that Frey's readers have no right to demand truth -- but they're dead wrong. Frey's history has nothing to do with fiction.

Indeed, anyone who's had to wade through Frey's godawful writing should have seen that he has neither literary talent nor authenticity as a druggie.

Perhaps that sounds a bit cocky. Well, I've got the record to back it up, because in a review I published in May 29, 2003, I started off by saying that AMLP was "the worst thing I've ever read" and went on to say that Frey was a phony, his characters recycled Hollywood types, his female lead, "Lilly," wholly invented and his story downright silly.

Now that Frey's been caught, I'm getting lots of emails praising me for seeing through Frey. But it was easy. The real question is, why couldn't the rest of the literate public see it?

In researching literary frauds, I've learned that the quality of the fraudster's writing is surprisingly unimportant in the success of the fraud. Thomas Chatterton, one of the most talented 18th-century fraudsters, killed himself, bitter and ashamed because no one wanted his faked medieval texts, whereas a few years later, James MacPherson, a cunning fake, became wealthy and adored for ridiculous "ancient Celtic epics" that were obvious pastiches of Milton, the Bible and other grand literature.

The reason the hack MacPherson succeeded and the brilliant Chatterton failed is that MacPherson's Scottish readers wanted desperately to believe in his faked texts. Expanding in confidence, growing rich after union with England, Scots wanted a national "classical" literature and took it when offered, ignoring the cheesy, obvious absurdities it contained.

John Dolan is an editor at the Moscow-based English alternative paper, The eXile. He is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).

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