Fuck the Bullshit It's Time to Throw Down

The Smoking Gun has published a very intriguing takedown of A Million Little Pieces, James Frey’s best-selling drug abuse diary and recent Oprah’s Book Club selection. It’s a lengthy, exhaustive critique, but here’s the gist: Frey is full of shit.

The Associated Press (via ABC) weighs in thusly, but Gawker's two cents are more succinct: "… It’s clear that Frey has taken some serious dramatic liberties. And that might not be such a big deal if he hadn’t consistently, appearance after appearance, insisted that all the events — even the little details — in the book are 100% true. Hell, he even brought Oprah to tears. And if you make Oprah cry under false pretenses, well, we just can’t stand by that."

No offense to Oprah or her fan base, but it probably doesn’t take all that much to move a bunch of sheltered suburban soccer moms to tears.

Now, from a purely technical point, Pieces is an annoying piece of crap. Frey has an extremely irritating writing style that features random capitalization of certain Words and Nouns which gives his Prose a pompous, Teutonic air that looks ugly on the page and somewhat hampers the readability of same:

"My closest friend is some kind of Mobster. My Roommate is a Federal Judge. My other friends are Crackheads and Drunks. I sort of have a Girlfriend, and she's a Crackhead and a Pillpopper and she used to be a prostitute...”

He doesn’t use quotation marks, either, a stylistic tic that draws attention to itself (“Look at me and my literary affectations!”) while, yes, greatly hampering his writing’s readability. And he uses the word fuck and its various permutations throughout the book because, you know, he’s just that much of a tough guy hardcore bad-ass motherfucker (the fact that Frey feels the need to constantly reinforce his image of tough guy rebel indicates that he probably isn’t nearly the hardcase he thinks he is and deep down, he knows it).

Indeed, most if not all of the press releases, articles, reviews and interviews that accompanied the publication of A Million Little Pieces boasted plenty of self-aggrandizing macho posturing on the part of Frey in which he proclaimed not only his greatness as an author, but also his Fury (sic), his raw intensity, his in-your-face realness, his utter bad-assedness, man, and if you can’t handle it, well then, fuck you, you sissy motherfucker. He has the acronym FTBSITTTD tattooed on his arm; it stands for “Fuck the Bullshit, It’s Time to Throw Down.” You know Frey’s straight up for reals now – he’s got tattoos, yo.

Frey is hardly the first self-obsessed hack to hit the jackpot with a self-consciously “dark” and “harrowing” memoir (see also: Elizabeth Wurtzel). What Frey actually is, however, is a pampered little rich kid who couldn’t handle his drugs in the long run, so he ended up scribbling out a 382-page love letter to himself about the whole tedious thing, which in the end kind of makes him the sort of sniveling pussy-ass writer he claims to despise.

Via his offical web site, Frey responds: "So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response."

I guess that settles it, then. Suck on that, bitches!