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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

An Aside of Frey’s

posted by on April 29 at 12:16 PM

In the issue of Vanity Fair with the stupid Miley Cyrus bullshit photos, there’s also a stupid James Frey bullshit interview. It’s an incredibly fawning piece, and the writer adores Frey’s upcoming novel, Bright Shiny Morning. Here’s some of Frey’s James Dean-like behavior:

Frey has fetishized breaking rules for as long as he’s been alive. On a casual level this makes him endearing. He routinely addresses women, even ones he barely knows, as “dude,” and he might break the ice with a stranger with “Yo, what the fuck’s up?” At the age of 38, he still makes crank calls. Sometimes he’ll call from the street corner and put on a high-pitched, crazy-old-person voice, drawing out every syllable of your name. Sometimes he pretends to be in an emergency, as he did the other day when he phoned his editor’s assistant:

“Allison, fuck, Allison, I need your help now! I’m on the corner of 56th and Fifth Avenue and a fucking bus just drove by and drenched me! I have two more meetings and I need you to go buy me some underwear and buy me some pants.”

He’s been known to show up at a Halloween party wearing nothing but a Speedo, and he’s not the sort who works out.

Ho-ho! What a kidder! That sounds like a terrific 38-year-old man to hang around with!
And he’s a literary renegade, too. This is the bit about him unveiling the manuscript for A Million Little Pieces for the first time:

Early on, he showed it to someone who had an M.F.A. in writing. The reaction was the same one Kerouac got after he gave his editor On the Road, one crazy-long paragraph written on a paper-towel-size scroll. Frey recalls, “They sent back a note that said, ‘This is unpublishable. This would get destroyed in my workshop.’ And I was like, ‘Cool,’ you know? ‘Cool.’”

Get ready for the Frey-pocalypse. Expect tons of reconsiderations and reassessments of his work: His new novel is released on May 13th.


RSS icon Comments

1

he should go on a book tour with augusten burroughs and lee siegel.

Posted by brett | April 29, 2008 12:20 PM
2

Practically every teenaged boy in America routinely adresses women as "dude". This counts a notable?

Posted by inkweary | April 29, 2008 12:33 PM
3

an immature 38 year old male. woah.

Posted by infrequent | April 29, 2008 12:43 PM
4

Definitely sounds like a loser whose only notable accomplishment was that he wrote a couple of books.

Posted by Greg | April 29, 2008 1:06 PM
5

Wow, prank calls AND a speedo? Now there's a rebel.

I know it's a slow news day and we all have ADD, Slog, but seriously, this AND a National Enquirer piece about Obama cheating?

Posted by Marty | April 29, 2008 1:27 PM
6

not sure who's more irritating, this fucktard or the idiots who believed all the nonsense in his "memoirs"...

Posted by michael strangeways | April 29, 2008 1:31 PM
7

At least this is being sold as ficton from the start!

Posted by pastrychef | April 29, 2008 9:31 PM
8

i guess he was right though -- his life is way more interesting when he's lying about it.

Posted by infrequent | April 30, 2008 8:36 AM
9

@7... months later we'll find out that this one is actually based on facts!

Posted by infrequent | April 30, 2008 9:02 AM

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