Dumping James Frey
James Frey is like my ex-boyfriend of the literary world. Yeah, sure, I enjoyed A Million Little Pieces as a memoir, but after I found out he'd lied to me about the whole dental surgery without Novocaine thing, I wanted him gone. I didn't want him dead, but he was dead to me. He keeps on calling me with new works of fiction, and it's like, enough already. We're over. I was willing to look past the fact that A Million Little Pieces was overwritten and self-aggrandizing when it was a memoir, but as fiction, he could have at least written himself into a likable character. And now he has a blog, which would normally be totally annoying, but just confirms why I dumped him in the first place.
His website is entirely reblogged stories about hard-drinking writers and YouTube clips. I don't think there's any original content on it. The man is just incapable of love. He's not exactly an internet plagiarist — he credits the original authors — but I would think after the whole Oprah thing, he would want to avoid further looking like a fraud.
Even when he's being self-referential, he's stealing from other people: He posts a clip of a lesbian saying she hates of Jenny the L-Word so much, that she wants the character to have a James Frey experience on Oprah. And anyway, hating Jenny from the L-Word is not exactly a new opinion.
Lying and plagiarizing are the literary equivalents of cheating and beating. They're both dumpable offenses. In the words of a friend who was getting over an ex, James Frey is out of my life and off of my buddy list.