Somehow, in our ADD-inflicted carelessness, we missed this Guardian interview with Fake Writer James Frey; it's the disgraced memoirist's first interview since Oprah gave him a national flogging back in January. Frey says quite a bit but, as it's coming from an admitted liar, it's hard to know what to believe. Rather than ask that you try to parse the interview on your own, we've gone ahead and provided our translation services:

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."

Frey means: I am familiar with obvious classics. Also, I'm a murderous cockroach.

"We had reporters camped out at the front and back entrances of our building," he says. "For a while I couldn't leave the apartment at all. And then when I could leave I left with a bodyguard and got directly into a black SUV."

Frey means: I relate to Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

"You never expect anything like that to happen," he says. "I'm a writer. 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."

Frey means: I am but a simple man. I want simple things: millions of dollars and the privacy in which I might enjoy the trappings of my wealth.

"Never had anybody say anything negative to me, ever," he says. "No. Most people just say they loved the books, or it helped them, or someone they knew."

Frey means: I used to be a contender.

"I actually went and started seeing a shrink before the controversy erupted," he says. "I just [felt] uncomfortable. It's weird when you become a transparent person. I don't do what I do to be famous."

Frey means: I pay $250 for 45 minutes of affirmation so that I might tell you, with conviction, that I dislike fame.

"I never got into it to sell 25 books, and get written up in the local paper," he says. "I wanted to be a writer that had an impact. 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 100 years."

Frey means: I can sleep easy knowing that I have still achieved this goal. Notoriety will suffice.

"I think writers and artists in general come in two forms: there are thinkers, and feelers. 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. Strip everything away. Make it not about intellectualism at all, make it about emotional heart. It's like they were making conceptual art, and I'm making expressionistic art."

Frey means: I am not clever.

"Before I started, I read a lot of the authors who had achieved what I wanted to achieve, tried to figure out what they had in common," he says. "The most obvious thing all of them had was when they were published, nobody had ever seen anything like what they were doing, in terms of how they did it and what they said." He hauls out the blueprints: "I mean like Baudelaire, Celine, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac." The names are growled, like those of old drinking partners. "You know, I'm an American male and I looked to that tradition for guidance, and I hope someday to be included among that group of American writers."

Frey means: I really just refuse to accept the reality of the situation, you know?

I just started trying to figure out how to write [something] which was unlike anything anybody had ever seen, and once I felt like I had figured that out I tried to figure out what kind of book I could write that would be unlike anything anybody had ever seen. When I started writing A Million Little Pieces I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going."

Frey means: The book was so original, it was a complete work of imagination.

"We live in a fast world," he says. "Much faster than has ever been before. So to write something that was very relevant to our time I wanted to write something that was very fast, that kept a reader moving. Cos that's what they expect in our world today, with the music and the film and the telephones and the internet. That's just how our brains function." He says he would rather his writing read like spoken language, "So I talk everything out. I talk my sentences through, and when they sound right I write them."

Frey means: I am very annoying to live with.

"People asked me, 'How much of it's true, how much of it's not true?' " he says. "Initially I said, 'I want it to be published as a novel so I don't have to get into all that. I don't wanna have to go through picking it apart, talking about what was changed and why.' Things were changed for all sorts of reasons: effect, for respect, other people's anonymity, making the story function properly."

Frey means: Not my fault!

"Y'know, those guys wrote books about their lives and published them as fiction. I mean the idea that The Sun Also Rises is not about Hemingway's life, or On the Road is not about Kerouac's life, or anything ever written by Bukowski or Celine or Henry Miller is not about those men's lives is a ridiculous idea. I think if a lot of those guys were writing now they'd be published as memoirs."

Frey means: If you're angry at me, you might as well be angry with these literary icons, as I am just as talented as they are.

"What's interesting is that On the Road was going to be published as non-fiction, and they altered it cos they were worried about legal ramifications," Frey says of Kerouac's largely autobiographical work of 1957. "And because at the time fiction was much more popular than non-fiction. For me it was almost the opposite, y'know - non-fiction is much more popular now."

Frey means: I spend a lot of time rationalizing things.

"So the idea that nobody at the publishing company knew it was a manipulated manuscript is an absurd idea," he says. "I remember somebody at the publishing company told me that if the book's 85% true there's no problem. Certainly that standard wasn't then applied to it later."

Frey means: Not my fault!

"I think a lot of it had to do with what was happening and is still happening in our country, y'know?" he says. "People feel frustrated by a lot of distortions by politicians, by members of the media, by movie stars, by tabloid journalists, and it was like a sorta confluence of events that I happened to be in the middle of."

Frey means: Actually, this whole mess is YOUR fault.

Frey read the Smoking Gun report at the same time as everyone else. "I was sorta shocked by it," he says. "And I was upset by it and surprised by it. Just surprised that the book would be put under that much scrutiny, and picked apart so thoroughly. Throughout this I've been surprised by the venom with which people have come after me."

Frey means: Who knew? The internet! That shit's amazing.

"Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard," he says. "Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature. I thought in doing that it was OK to take certain licences." All storytellers, he argues, are embellishers. "To tell a story effectively you manipulate information ... I think that if stories were told always exactly as they really happened most of them would be really boring."

Frey means: I did what I did to make you happy. Can't you understand that?

"I mean it's interesting," he says, "the Europeans as a whole reacted very, very differently to the controversy than the Americans did, and the European media looked at it very, very differently from the American media."

Frey means: Oprah ain't got shit across the Atlantic.

"My agent just called me and said she couldn't work with me any more because she felt her integrity was being questioned," he says, and frowns a little. "My publisher called and said they were cancelling my new contract simply because they didn't want to honour it." The most curious thing, he says, was that despite the scandal they had made, were continuing to make, an enormous sum of money out of James Frey. "I mean, that's sort of the irony, y'know? My agent said her integrity was questioned, but it wasn't questioned enough for her to stop taking the money."

Frey means: Kassie Evashevski's a whore.

Does he, one wonders, regret any of it? "Well, I think that, doing it over, I would probably do certain things differently," he says. "I would be more clear up front about the fact that it was a manipulated text, that it was a text that was not a work of non-fiction." His expression is unreadable. "I generally try not to go through life regretting things, or playing the what-if game. Whatever I have said I have said, whatever I have done, I have done."

Frey means: Except, you know, the stuff I said I'd done that I'd not actually done.

The Man Who Rewrote His Life [Guardian]