Meanwhile, A Million Little Pieces is now published with "a note to the reader" included. In it, Frey apologises to any reader who has "been disappointed by my actions", and says: "My mistake, and it is one I deeply regret, is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.
We sit in a dimly lit corner of a Manhattan restaurant across the street from his apartment. It is the beginning of the lunchtime rush; shouts, shattering crockery, steaming plates of carbonara spill out of the kitchen. Frey is wary. He has not given any interviews since Oprah in January. Today he has brought his own dictaphone, and places it side by side with mine on the restaurant table, where they sit like an uneasy cruet set.
Since the Smoking Gun report, it has been, he says slowly, a "very surreal six months, very strange. Sometimes terrible, slightly overwhelming. It's been like living in a Camus book, or a Kafka book, or something. I never expected to be recognised on the street. I never expected to get that kind of coverage, good or bad. I never expected to sell as many books as I have.
And it was just overwhelming. What was hurled at Frey was a furious mass of both loathing and veneration. Even now, if you type his name into an internet search engine, he turns up both streams of vitriol from those who feel defrauded, and fervent defenders of his writing. Of the 5, letters sent to him, he says, only 50 have been hate mail. People still stop him in the street.
Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew. It's weird when you become a transparent person. I don't do what I do to be famous. He may not have wanted the kind of fame that would cause him to be recognised on the street, but he undoubtedly desired notoriety. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or years.
I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want 50 bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in.
I want something anything whatever however as much as I can. When Frey first arrived on the literary scene he showed no qualms about squaring up to the distinguished writers of the period, writers such as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, just as in rehab he wasted no time by his account in challenging the toughest guy in the centre to a brawl. And I think those guys are thinkers, their work is about the intellect. The intellectual gamesmanship, it was all about irony and postmodernism and it was very clever.
And none of those things were things I care about. I care about what I feel and how I feel it. So I actually set out to do absolutely the opposite. In Oprah's phone call to Frey last year, she told him that she'd been meditating and suddenly realized that part of her reaction to his mendacity stemmed from her personally feeling duped and betrayed.
She said, in what might be a first for any entertainment mogul, "I feel I owe you an apology. Frey, who told TIME he was "very surprised" to get the call, had gone on to write another book, a novel titled Bright Shiny Morning , which received mixed but not universally awful reviews including a good one from TIME and which came out in paperback on May The paperback has some passages that were not in the original, including those about a guy who has tapes of phone calls with a talk-show host who has given him a hard time, which has led to speculation that Frey has audiotapes of Oprah.
The priorities now are taking care of my family and producing the best work of my life. If only one of these former feudsters had a syndicated TV show so that the making up could be as public as the breaking up!
One of the victim's parent's stated of Frey's fabrication, "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident. I figured he was taking license In Frey's original Oprah interview, he stated, "If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.
In her second interview with the author, Winfrey called out Frey, stating, "I don't know what is true and I don't know what isn't," before essentially calling him a con man. After Frey confirmed that The Smoking Gun article's allegations were true, Winfrey saw red, stating, "I think you presented a false person," calling him "Mr. Bravado tough guy. His book, a million seller thanks to Winfrey, remained in the top 5 Thursday on Amazon. Beyond Frey, and his publishers, stories of suffering may themselves take a fall.
Leroy and Nasdijj have been questioned.
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