James Frey

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James Frey, 2018

James Christopher Frey (born September 12, 1969 in Cleveland , Ohio ) is an American writer whose apparently autobiographical novels A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard became bestsellers in the United States. Both books are about drug use and alcohol addiction . Frey's claims about his life as an addict and his alleged conflicts with the law became the subject of widespread controversy in early 2006 when The Smoking Gun website found that almost none of his experiences existed. After this scandal over fake “authenticity” Frey embarked on a new artistic path and wrote the collage-like, formally ambitious Los Angeles novel Bright Shiny Morning , which was published in 2008.

biography

Life

Frey grew up in Ohio and Michigan and graduated from high school in 1988 to study at Denison University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . In 1993, he had drug addiction and alcoholism treated at Hazelden Rehabilitation Clinic in Minnesota for two months and has not relapsed since.

Frey moved to Chicago in 1994 and struggled with odd jobs before moving to Los Angeles in 1996 , where he worked as a screenwriter and filmmaker. Frey currently resides in New York City with his wife Maya and daughter Maren .

Career

In 1996 Frey began work on the novel A Million Little Pieces (published in German under the title Tausend kleine Schherd ). In order to devote all of his time and energy to the book, he took out a second mortgage on his house and saved up in all possible places. After completing the novel, he initially wanted to sell it as a fictional work, but was unsuccessful.

A Million Little Pieces was released as an autobiography in May 2003 and became a bestseller. In it, Frey describes in extremely drastic language how he allegedly became a criminal at an early age, took drugs and was imprisoned several times. In 2004, the second part of this alleged autobiography followed with My Friend Leonard .

In September 2005, A Million Little Pieces was featured on Oprah Winfrey's TV show and widely acclaimed. After that, the novel became even more popular and topped the bestseller lists again.

controversy

On January 8, 2006, the authors of the Internet site The Smoking Gun published an extensive article under the title A Million Little Lies (freely translated "a thousand little lies", in relation to Frey's book title). It shows that there is no evidence for most of the experiences Frey reports and even some may never have happened. Nowhere in the United States is there any crime record or other data that confirms his imprisonment or involvement in other illegal activities.

A former neighbor of the Freys, Paul Santarlas, contradicts James Frey's statement that he was known as the "bad boy" in the city. The relatives of two students, Jane Hall and Melissa Sanders, who died in a 1986 train accident in Michigan, apparently do not know anything about Frey's involvement as he describes it in his book. It is also noticeable that almost all the important characters from his alleged life are dead, deranged or cannot be found for other reasons and so nobody can confirm what has been reported.

Even before the Smoking Gun article, several newspapers and Internet services had questioned Frey's remarks, including the English-language newspaper the eXile , published in Moscow , which was the only “jail” Freys could find five harmless hours in a police station, after which he was on bail was released. The Minneapolis Star Tribune had already questioned the book in 2003, whereupon Frey had admitted to having changed "small details" for reasons of drama.

After both his publisher and Oprah Winfrey had initially expressed their support and trust in Frey, more and more critical voices were raised until the author finally admitted publicly that he had invented essential parts of his two biographies. A formal apology was added to the new editions of the books, while Winfrey expressed her anger and disappointment over the falsehoods on her talk show - she was then accused of acting unbelievable.

comeback

With Bright Shiny Morning , James Frey presented himself in 2008 after two years of silence as an ambitious author who made the infinitely many facets of a metropolis ( Los Angeles ) the subject of his novel, relying on role models such as Victor Hugo , Charles Dickens , Lev Tolstoy and John Dos Passos calls. The book is a kaleidoscope of partly dramatic, partly banal individual fates that are told in parallel without any connection and cover a wide variety of milieus and layers. In addition, Frey compiles long lists of “Fun Facts” and “Facts Not So Fun” about Los Angeles, which concern, for example, gun ownership, street gangs, natural disasters and the traffic route network. In addition, he also sprinkles presumably made-up details such as the banana museum, the video cemetery and the Hitler studies. The last page is about the fascination that LA exerts on immigrants from all over the world, even if their dreams often fail.

The novel received mostly positive feedback. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin , who had previously been one of Frey's harshest critics, expressed her admiration for the “big book” and the “furiously good storyteller”. In the Guardian, the British writer Irvine Welsh judged that Bright Shiny Morning can be described without exaggeration as the literary comeback of the decade: "James Frey is probably one of the best and most important authors who have appeared in recent years." the Los Angeles Times, in which David L. Ulin wrote of a "hideous novel" and "literary wreck". In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, its USA correspondent Jordan Mejias reported on a “fragmented city panorama in the brightest colors”, a “spicy stew” and Frey's “outrageous casualness”.

For “the sheer number and length of dubious erotic passages” in his novel Katerina , Frey was honored with the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2018 .

bibliography

Novels

  • 2003 - A Million Little Pieces (German: Thousand Little Shards , Goldmann 2004. ISBN 3-442-31072-5 )
  • 2005 - My Friend Leonard
  • 2008 - Bright Shiny Morning (dt. Radiant beautiful morning , Ullstein 2009. ISBN 978-3-550-08767-7 )
  • 2010 - I Am Number Four (German: I am number four , structure 2011. ISBN 978-3-351-04128-1 )
  • 2011 - The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (dt. The last testament of the Holy Scriptures , Haffmans & Tolkemitt 2012. ISBN 978-3-942989-04-6 )
  • 2014 - Endgame - The Calling (Eng. Endgame: Die Chosen , Oetinger 2014. ISBN 3-7891-3522-4 )
  • 2015 - Endgame - Sky Key (German Endgame: The Hope , Oetinger 2015. ISBN 978-3-7891-3524-8 )
  • 2016 - Endgame - Rules of the Game (Eng. Endgame: The Decision , Oetinger 2016. ISBN 978-3-8415-0419-7 )
  • 2018 - Katerina . John Murray

Scripts

  • 1998 - Kissing a Fool
  • 1998 - Sugar: The Fall of the West
  • 2006 - a thousand small pieces

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Frey, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frey, James Christopher (full name); Lore, Pittacus (author's pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1969
PLACE OF BIRTH Cleveland , Ohio , United States