Literary Rogues (29 page)

That afternoon meeting at Mailer's loft reenergized and refocused Frey. He finished his novel,
Bright Shiny Morning
, and HarperCollins published it in 2008 to mixed reviews. He wasn't stomped on for it, though, and even some of his most vocal detractors during the
A Million Little Pieces
scandal admitted that Frey was, indeed, talented.

Next, he abruptly changed creative direction with Full Fathom Five, a book-packaging company based on an artist's studio model—think Andy Warhol's factory, with James Frey in the Warhol role. His goal? “
To produce the next
Twilight
,” according to a
New York
magazine article that “exposed” the operation in November 2010. At the time the article appeared, Steven Spielberg had already optioned the movie rights to Full Fathom Five's first bestseller,
I Am Number Four
.

The Internet piled on Frey, calling his venture a “fiction factory” and a “sweatshop.” Is Frey a savior who is helping young writers navigate the publishing business and making them rich via his Hollywood contacts, or are writers who sign with him signing deals with the devil? Ghostwriting is not a new phenomenon. Neither is the studio model, which has been used by Hollywood for ages. “People like to
make me out to be a villain
,” he told a UK reporter. “I really have no interest in being cast as a bad boy in this case.” His insipration for Full Fathom Five, Frey said, was his sincere love of books.

In spring 2010, Frey invites me to tour his SoHo sweatshop firsthand. “
I'm there every day
with my whip and my bullhorn and my team of pitbull lawyers,” he jokes in an e-mail.

On the day I'm scheduled to meet Frey at his office, the skies are overcast and spitting freezing rain. “You should wear a wire and take backup,” one of my friends suggests. “Y'know, in case he tries to shank you or something.”

I don't wear a wire, but I would kill for an umbrella. When it rains in Manhattan, umbrella vendors usually appear from out of nowhere. “You imagine
these umbrella peddlers
huddled around powerful radios waiting for the very latest from the National Weather Service,” Jay McInerney wrote in
Bright Lights, Big City
. Unfortunately, even the umbrella peddlers go into hiding when it's thirty-five degrees out.

The doorman at Frey's building looks as beaten by the weather as I am. He asks whom I'm there to see.

“James Frey,” I say.

He waves me by, a bit too quickly, as if I'm a condemned man. As the elevator rises to the fifth floor, a chill goes through my body. It's just because I'm soaked, I tell myself.

On the fifth floor, a large glass door automatically slides into the wall like something out of
Star Trek
. A cheerful receptionist walks me by rows of cubicles that belong to another company and drops me off at the Full Fathom Five office space: four cubes, where Frey's employees sit, and an enclosed office that Frey occupies. I've been to an actual Chinese sweatshop, and the swank working conditions at Full Fathom Five are nowhere near as grim. As I'll learn, the original press reports of a legion of recent MFA graduates churning out ghostwritten young adult novels for Frey were sensationalized—of the dozens of writers working from home for Full Fathom Five, only a handful are fresh out of college, and many of the studio's writers even write under their own names.

Frey is hunched over a computer, assisting one of his employees.
No bullhorn in sight
. In his appearances on Oprah's couch, he towered over her. In person, though, he appears to be about average-sized. With his closely cropped hair, crisp white T-shirt, pressed khakis, and Adidas Superstar 2.0 low-top sneakers (white with black stripes), Frey could pass for a hip Silicon Valley executive. This is the bad boy of American letters?

I introduce myself and he invites me into his office. The walls are covered with his kids' crayon drawings. The office is small (less than fifty square feet), unfurnished except for a computer desk and two chairs. Frey seats himself at his desk; I take one of the other chairs, which is uncomfortably low to the ground. “
Not quite what you were expecting
?” he asks.

“Not quite,” I say. “I thought you'd be ... taller.”

As we chat over the course of the afternoon, Frey repeatedly stops to read me the latest James Frey gossip. “
Did you read the
Esquire
piece on me a few months ago?” he asks, searching for the bookmarked webpage on his MacBook. “They understand what I'm trying to do in Europe,” he says as he pulls up a
Guardian
article.

When we meet, Frey is on the eve of publication of his latest novel,
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible
, a “sequel” to the New Testament that resurrects Christ as an alcoholic Brooklynite. “Apparently James Frey has
a tiny man in his head
, like some kind of internalized boss, who barks, ‘You haven't enraged anyone lately!' and starts cracking the whip whenever things slow down,” critic Laura Miller wrote, noting that revisionist tellings of Jesus Christ's life are nothing new. Among the many “radical” retellings of Christ's story she cited:
The Gospel According to the Son
by that other literary bad boy, Norman Mailer.

The Final Testament
had a limited print release in the United States, by Frey's own design. He chose to skip traditional publishing houses and self-release it through an art dealer. “
I always wanted to be the outlaw
,” he told the
Guardian
on the eve of the book's release. “When I got sent to rehab I refused to adhere by the rules. I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.”

European publishers, by contrast, understand that Frey doesn't always play by the rules. “
They won't blink in the face
of controversy and don't run away from it. In America that's not always the case. I think big commercial publishers in the United States don't want to deal with controversy or firestorm or trouble,” he says. The reader response can best be summarized by this anonymous Internet comment: “Oh,
what a naughty, naughty boy
he is. He should be roundly spanked, and told to act his age.”

Addressing the controversy that has followed him his entire career, Frey said in 2009, “I'm
fine with my life
. Wouldn't change a fucking thing. The goal has always been to write books that have enough power to continue to be read long after I'm gone, to become part of history in some way.”

Frey's advice for today's writers? “
Be willing to misbehave
. Take and receive shots. Cause problems and polarize opinion,” he tells me, indicating that he believes being a literary rogue is less about self-destructive behaviors than about a willingness to stake out contrarian opinions. “Writers today are polite and meek and scared of bad publicity. Unless that changes, they will fade away.”

“T
oday's writers seem
a more cautious lot, less interested in some macho image and less admiring of Hemingway and his giant fish than their elders,” feminist author Anne Roiphe wrote in 2011, contrasting the modern era with the 1950s. If she's right, it's not just writers who have changed—it's Western culture. We've become more sensitive and less brazenly self-destructive. “Rehab” and “recovery” are no longer dirty words.

While these are all positive changes, it seems we can't stop ourselves from romanticizing the past. Who doesn't want to return to a time when we could drink, smoke, and have sex with impunity? “
The ‘good old times,'
” Lord Byron once remarked wistfully. “All times when old are good.”

As we've seen in
Literary Rogues
, the good old times were rarely as great up close as from a distance. It's far more romantic to imagine Dylan Thomas pounding back his eighteenth consecutive shot of whiskey and keeling over on his barstool than it is to hear about him clinging to this world, brain-dead and on an oxygen machine for close to a week. Truman Capote's and Hunter S. Thompson's drug abuse was a riot—until it wasn't. “
My addictions and problems
were not cool or fun or glamorous in any way whatsoever,” James Frey once wrote. As the saying goes, it's all fun and games until someone chokes on the business end of a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Up close, wayward authors appear more human, less remarkable. There's nothing special about being addicted to opium or taking a shit on a porch that made these wayward writers somehow more notable than their sane and sober colleagues. Take a look at any list of the top hundred novels of all time, and you'll see plenty of quiet, sober names mixed in with the Fitzgeralds, Faulkners, and Hemingways. No, it ultimately wasn't because of their shocking behavior that they left behind anything of value—it was in spite of it. They should have been nothing more than cannon fodder. Somehow, even total failures at the game of life like John Berryman have achieved immortality by virtue of their pens.

It's easy to burn your lips on a crack pipe or ball your way through a Parisian whorehouse in the 1890s. Attempting to create something of value in a world that tells you at every turn to shut up and color inside the lines, that conformity leads to success? That's real rebellion. Writing may be a more acceptable occupation than it was two hundred years ago, but don't let that fool you: there are still a million things your family would rather see you do than pursue a career in literature. Hell, there are a million things
society
would rather have you do. In a way, all authors are literary rogues.

But,
to paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates
, nobody tells anecdotes about the quiet people who just do their work. As memoirists have known for years, the more fucked-up your life, the more compelling your life story. So if you're a writer and want to be included in
Literary Rogues 2
, I recommend picking up an opium pipe, loading your gun, and getting to work...

T
hank you to my editors, Maya Ziv and Stephanie Meyers, and the entire crew at Harper Perennial (Cal Morgan, Erica Barmash, Gregory Henry, Julie Hersh, Fritz Metsch, Amy Baker, et al.). Without you, there would be no book.

Thank you to my agent, Brandi Bowles, and her colleagues at Foundry Literary + Media.

Thank you to all of the bookstores, libraries, writer's conferences, and burlesque theaters that hosted me on my
Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love
book tour, including: BookCourt, Greenlight, and Word in Brooklyn; the Naked Girls Reading crew worldwide, including Michelle L'amour, Franky Vivid, Naked Girls Reading Chicago, Naked Girls Reading NYC, and the Boston Baby Dolls; Lady Jane's Salon at Madame X in Manhattan; RT Booklovers Convention; the Book Blogger Convention; RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia; BookExpo America; and the Metro Library Network's Out Loud Author Series in Iowa.

Thank you to my parents for their support over the years. My mother: “What's your book about?” Me: “Writers who drink and generally misbehave.” Her: “So it's about you?”

Thank you to my beta readers (listed by Twitter handles): @tiffanyreisz, @wellreadwife, @mrstomsauter, @j_hussein, @henningland, @hockeyvamp, @carathebruce, @edieharris, @cortney_writes, @write_by_night, @alyslinn, @juniperjenny, @annabelleblume, @karenbbooth, @muchadoabout77, and @fishwithsticks.

Thank you to the following writers who discussed
Literary Rogues
with me in some form or another: James Frey, Elizabeth Wurtzel, J. Michael Lennon, Eric Olsen, Glenn Schaeffer, Joe Haldeman, Daniel Friedman, Sean Ferrell, Benjamin Hale, Alexander Chee, and Marvin Bell.

Thank you to T. C. Boyle. While I was finishing the book, I ran into T. C. Boyle in Iowa City during the 75th Writer's Workshop reunion. He's intelligent, charming, eccentric, and a little bit goofy—in other words, a lot like a T. C. Boyle novel. After I told him about
Literary Rogues
, he rattled off the passage from his short story “Greasy Lake” that now appears as the book's epigraph. Entirely from memory.