Bring It, You Beautiful Motherfucker
Okay, I’m really tempted to restrict my comments on James Frey to this link, ’cause it’s brill (and it’s from 2003), but that would mean shutting up. Still, I’m pretty sure I can’t ever top “Suck my cock tattoo that says suck my cock, James Frey, you whore.” I’m totally gonna tattoo my labia with “Neal Pollack, please have a beer with me,” just in case I ever meet him and don’t know what to say.
I wasn’t paying too much attention to the Frey scandal, because… well, who cares? A) I am so over discussing the line between fiction and creative non-fiction, and B) If people want to shell out for a specious and, by several accounts, horribly written memoir, that’s their problem. I worked in publishing long enough to know the public thirst for confessional horseshit is unquenchable, and it’s one of those things I just try not to think too hard about for my own sanity, like the war and Paris Hilton and whether consciousness really can affect matter and the amount of money I’ve spent at The Gap in the last ten years. But then I read that he did try to sell this as a novel, and was rejected 17 times, before Nan Talese told him to call it a memoir, and they’d sell a million little copies. That hurts my feelings. That’s just doing an end-run around a rare show of good taste among the book-buying public: the fact that we’re all sick to fucking death of novels about twentysomething white boys who fancy themselves hardcore and think an unexamined catalogue of drug experiences and Great Moments in Scatology constitutes “edgy” fiction. Unfair!
So, I’m not particularly offended by James Frey’s profiting so spectacularly from being a big, fat liar. I’m offended by his profiting so spectacularly from writing a bad novel. I’ve written enough terrible fiction in my lifetime to fill at least the first floor of my local Borders–where’s mine, Nan Talese? Where’s mine, Oprah? Huh?
so that’s pretty much a no for book club then? ;-)
Heh. Pretty much.
i haven’t read it yet, but it’s gotta be better than most of the pretentious tripe published as “literary” (read: academic) fiction these days.
and, factually, isn’t he more of a small, skinny liar than a big, fat one?
bah! it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t affect the price of bus fare one bit.
okay. no fighting. please.
BRING IT!!!