Telling Tales (25 page)

Oprah tearfully recommended his memoir to all her viewers, especially those with a friend or family battling substance abuse. (Frey had been into everything, from wine to crack.) She told how the entire staff of her production company, Harpo, was glued to the book, calling it ‘like nothing you’ve ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we’d come in the next morning saying, “What page are you on?” ’

However, three months later, on 8 January 2006, the legal news website
The Smoking Gun
revealed that police records from the time of Frey’s self-confessed crimes and incarceration did not corroborate what was written in the book. The car-train crash in which two young women died had been in the news at the time, but there was nothing showing Frey’s involvement. One of the deceased girls’ parents even came forward to say she would have known if Frey had been involved and he emphatically had not. It also seemed that rather than having been in jail for more than eighty days, as he claimed, he had only been held in custody for a few hours. And another of Frey’s criminal boasts, that he had been intimidated by FBI investigators over a high-level drugs ring, was, in reality, a not very exciting student pot-selling misdemeanour he had been questioned about while at university.

The editors of
The Smoking Gun
approached Frey with their findings via an off-the-record email, which Frey then reproduced, calling it the latest attempt to discredit him: ‘Let the haters hate,’ he wrote, ‘let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.’

When the website finally published their article ‘A Million Little Lies: Exploring James Frey’s Fiction Addiction’, however, the mud they flung at the discredited author proved harder to wash off. Suddenly, the news, television and online media which had once been so impressed by the bestselling memoirist’s work all cottoned on to the fact that they may have been taken in and began demanding answers. Especially as Frey’s follow-up to that first volume of memoir,
My Friend Leonard
, had recently been published.

Frey decided to go on the popular CNN talk show
Larry King Live
and, sitting next to his mother whom he had brought to the studio with him, attempt some damage limitation. This took the form of denying most of the accusations against him and claiming that the main point of the book – his struggle with addiction – was all true, and he had only changed certain minor details to protect the identities of those involved. Towards the end of filming, King took a phone-call from Oprah Winfrey, who defended her beloved Frey, maintaining that his book could be a valuable resource for anyone coping with alcoholism. Later, Oprah would admit: ‘I regret that phone call. I left the impression that the truth does not matter. To everyone who has challenged me about this book – you are absolutely right.’

While, in the days that followed the Larry King interview, Oprah had cause to regret ever endorsing
A Million Little Pieces
, his publishers and agents were getting seriously worried too. Although his editor Nan Talese seemed to be standing by him, Random House’s lawyers were realizing that to avoid accusations of consumer abuse they would have to either insert retractions into each new edition of the book, or set aside a fund of money to pay off litigious book-buyers who had been conned into buying something which was wrongly described as non-fiction. In fact, they ended up doing both.

In the Frey household, however, things were going from bad to worse. Kassie Evershevski, who had been James’ agent for nearly five years, parted company with the author over ‘matters of trust’, but conceded in an interview with
Publishers Weekly
that she still considered him ‘a very talented writer’. The fatal blow was to come on 26 January 2006 when Oprah invited both Frey and Nan Talese to come and sit on her sofa to discuss the general subject of truth and authorship in literature. What she actually had in mind was a grand public drubbing for the writer who had made her look stupid in front of millions of viewers. During an interview that is most uncomfortable to witness but impossible to look away from (not unlike Frey’s book), Oprah – power-dressed and coiffed spectacularly sleekly for the interrogation – repeatedly attacks him over the specifics of his mis-truths. She forces him to admit that he lied about his criminal activities, and to see how much he has embarrassed her. Then she brings in his publisher and compels her to admit that she did nothing to check the facts of Frey’s memoir, even though elements of them – the pain-relief-free dental surgery, for example – seem nothing if not far-fetched. Various other commentators such as Maureen Dowd and the
New York Times
’ Frank Rich are brought on to add their indignant two penn’orth, and by the end of the show the Frey debacle has been extrapolated to exemplify, along with the war in Iraq and the rise of reality TV, a nation almost dangerously reliant on lies and misinformation. The following days’ news reports gleefully echoed Larry King’s comment that ‘Oprah annihilates James Frey’.

Even though Oprah herself rang to check on her victim a few days later, and make sure he understood that she did what she did because she was so ‘disappointed’ in him, and Frey himself says he does not blame her for what she did, it seemed like he would never recover, professionally at least, from such a shaming. But the media is forgetful and can be surprisingly forgiving. Amidst rumours of a fall-out between Frey and Talese over Frey’s reported claims that his editor pushed him to change his book from fiction to non-fiction because misery memoirs were so much more marketable than novels, Frey quietly got on with doing what he had always wanted to do: writing fiction.

His first official novel came out in May 2008.
Bright Shiny Morning
is set in Los Angeles (where he and his wife and daughter live when they are not in their very swish New York loft apartment), and revolves around a cast of a hundred, offering snap-shots of their very different lives. The opening page of the book says simply: ‘Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable’, a disclaimer which he told one journalist ‘was sort of an acknowledgement of the past, and it was also a way to be really clear – this is fiction. Don’t take anything in it literally or too seriously.’ As he acknowledged in the same interview, he ‘made some big mistakes with my first two books, and I’ve tried to learn from them and move on’.

In interviews to promote his most recent book he seems, in the words of
The Times’
interviewer Alan Franks, ‘beyond unrepentant’. Frey told Franks, in what is probably the closest he has ever come to really explaining himself:

‘I’ve been in conflict with everything for my whole life . . . I’m in conflict with what writing is, in conflict with what literature is, in conflict with what people’s acceptable standards are. In conflict with the idea of what fiction and non-fiction is, or are . . . I’m not done with twisting the lines of fact or fiction . . . There isn’t a great deal of difference between fact and fiction, it’s just how you choose to tell a story.’

And for his next trick? No less than a retelling of the final book of the Bible, in which Jesus comes to New York to walk amongst crack-addicts, thieves and prostitutes. It will be interesting to see whether conservative America gets more or less ruffled by his fictional appropriation of Jesus than they did about his deceiving Oprah. It could be a close run thing.

I
F THE LA
gang memoir
Love and Consequences
had been for real, it would have been a very significant book indeed. For the first time, a mainstream publisher would be enabling a female gun-runner and drug dealer for the notorious Bloods to tell her story. At times, Margaret B. Jones’ memoir of growing up a hustler was almost too painful to read: it told of how she, a half Native-American, half-white child from a very poor family had been removed from her parents as a five-year-old when she had turned up to school bleeding from sexual wounds. Then, under the auspices of her overworked foster mother ‘Big Mom’ in South Central LA, she had fallen into the gang culture, seeing it as a way to gain money and respect in a fractured and abusive community. In interviews prior to the release of her book, Jones told – in an African-American lilt, and peppering her speech with words like ‘homies’ – that ‘the first thing I did when I started making drug money was buy myself a burial plot’. She also spoke movingly of her foster-brothers Terrell and Taye who had also fallen in to the thug life.

As soon as review copies were distributed, America’s literary press began heaping praise on the brave young writer who was risking serious retributions by exposing the intricacies of gang life. The Oprah Winfrey machine got behind the book too, praising it in
O Magazine
as ‘a startlingly tender memoir’; the
New York Times
called it ‘humane and deeply affecting’ and
Entertainment Weekly
recommended it as a ‘powerful story of resilience’. This was exactly the response the book’s publishers, Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin, had anticipated, and it seemed that the first print run of 19,000 copies had not been so ambitious after all.

Jones’ editor, Sarah McGrath, had been working on the manuscript with its damaged young author for three years before its eventual publication in February 2008, initially having been approached by the agent Faye Bender while she was working at Simon & Schuster. McGrath was so enamoured of the plucky young Margaret that when she moved to Penguin she arranged for Jones’ contract to be transferred with her, so the two women could continue working together. Throughout this period, Jones consistently impressed her editor with her desire to get her story out at all costs, and to communicate not only the pain and danger but the unbreakable bonds forged in the crucible of gang warfare. ‘She would talk about how she didn’t have any money or heat,’ recalled McGrath, who, along with her colleagues at the publishing house ‘felt such sympathy for her’. Their sympathy was augmented by the fact that Jones was a single mother, striving to make a better life for her young daughter than that which she had endured. And when the time came to crank up the publicity machine in the months leading up to
Love and Consequences
’ release date, affecting photographs of the pretty, brunette author were distributed to journalists. Other pictures were made available to the press too, such as the one of Jones with straightened hair, hoop earrings and tight white t-shirt, sitting on a wall in a rough area, every bit the care-worn homegirl; and of her holding up a bandana in the blood-red hues of the gang with which she was affiliated.

But it was an image of her posing with her young daughter, eight-year-old Rya, which would bring about her abrupt fall from grace. When the picture was published in the
New York Times
it was immediately spotted by a woman called Cyndi Hoffman, who recognized the faces in the picture. She recognized them because they belonged to her sister and niece. And far from being a juvenile gangbanger from the streets of South Central, her sister was the privileged daughter of wealthy, loving, white parents who had raised her in a smart district of the San Fernando Valley. She was not called Margaret B. Jones, but Margaret ‘Peggy’ Seltzer. And instead of having learnt about the world in crack-houses and stolen cars, she had been educated at the exclusive Campbell Hall, an Episcopalian private school in North Hollywood. Hoffman told all this to McGrath at Riverhead Books in a phone-call she felt duty bound to make as soon as she realized what he sister was doing. McGrath was astounded.

Having been outed by her own flesh and blood, there was nothing much Seltzer, now living in Oregon, could do. The media were chasing her for a statement, but initially had to make do with some words from her mother, whose defence of her apparently well-meaning daughter turned on her having been caught up in the drama of other people’s lives.

Eventually, a tearful and apologetic Seltzer herself agreed to talk to the press in a telephone interview in which she explained that during her years working in the voluntary sector to help combat the evils of gang violence, she had collected and in some way assimilated the experiences of her friends on the street.

Seltzer’s unmasking came just days before she was due to embark on a publicity tour to promote
Love and Consequences
to readers all over America. The tour was hastily cancelled, the 19,000 copies of the book were recalled, and Penguin’s imprint Riverhead was left not only with egg on its face but with a genuinely hurt editor. There was no way a book so explicitly autobiographical could be quietly re-issued as fiction, and there is no way certain members of the African American community will ever forgive this poor little rich girl for aping their language, lives and stories and very nearly getting away with it. However good her intentions might have been.