Her: What do you write?

Frey: I used to write screenplays now I write books.

Her: Oh, what kind of books, fiction or non-fiction?

Frey: (chuckles) Well, that's been up for debate recently.

Her: (absolutely no irony whatsoever) Well, don't you think you should choose?

Frey: (an arrogant laugh) To be honest with you, I don't really give a shit.

(Scene)

In related news, violence was reported at his book release party.

Crisis, violence, redemption, whatever: that's what he knew about. That's what he wrote about. That's what he passed off as nonfiction. That's why he sounded as if he'd seen too many lousy movies.
So the Bright Shiny Morning guy did it differently. He let the little vignette play out against a big, gaudy, dangerous Southern California backdrop, full of drug-dealing gang-bangers, full of schemers, phonies, rich with a history of robber barons, all of it listed here, all of it stacking the deck against any generosity of spirit. The son steals the maid's virtue? Been there, read that. They plot against the old lady? Been there too. This novelist wanted something else for Esperanza: he wanted to honor her, fall in love with her, do it with startling sincerity. He wanted to save her.

And it worked.

That's how James Frey saved himself.

Unnoticed under the din of all the turbo-charged, unflinching, badass excitement was an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in which the reporter, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, raised questions about the plausibility of the book. She asked Talese about possible factual discrepancies, and why there wasn't an author's note if, as Frey had told reporters, names and identifying characteristics had been changed. Talese said, "It's a total slipup that we didn't have a disclaimer page. I'm embarrassed."

"There's nothing to do there. You can go out to the yard and walk around or shoot hoops or lift weights. I didn't really want to do anything, so I spent most of my time reading books." He added that his reading list inside the slammer included Don Quixote, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov.

James Frey's Morning After [Vanity Fair]

"Most people were surprisingly sporting about the whole thing. A few objected so violently that I had to change their names. Others took issue with the most unexpected things. Take Chris Wilson, with whom I worked on the New York Post gossip column. I had written in some detail about the freebie overseas holidays we took, and the fact we got smashed almost every night for two years and rarely saw a bill.

He rang me up in a fury.

"I can't believe you have done this to me! You have me using the word 'ridonculous' four times! What the hell? I'll be saying fo-shizzle next!"

Says one writer, currently shopping a memoir to agents:

"Boilerplate responses to partials are part of the game, to be sure, but I have certainly noticed a sway in the 'current climate' that may or may-not be related to lying writers. I finished my book and called it a novel because I thought it might play well with the agents if I were to say, 'With all these lying writers, what if I told a true story and called it a novel?' The story I tell in my novel is all fact and is as tragic as it is hilarious. I grew up in squalor, under a set of huckleberry circumstances so bafflingly fucked that the only means of keeping it together was to work - and to write it all down and make fun of it."

"After I finished the book and queried some agents, I had ten requests for the manuscript. Four have turned it down... A better question might be: who gives a fuck? I look on the bright side. My story is implausible - there's no way anyone will believe it in the "current climate". I keep rooting for Charles Bock and the other etceteras who seem to be moving forward with their true-to-life coming-of-age tales which are now getting published as novels."

"I'm a two-time loser when it comes to fake memoirists fucking me up. My first book, Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, was eight weeks away from release when the James Frey story broke... I wrote to my editor right away to say, "Hey, you guys know you can trust me, right? How about if I come in to your lawyer's office with all my memorabilia and show you that I really was an unsavory, promiscuous, drug-addled kleptomaniac teenager?"

The good folks at Random House granted me an audience, and I shlepped a bag full of old notes, journals, photos, and report cards up to the office, where I dumped them all on the desk - "Look, here's a song I wrote to the tune of 'Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,' about stealing from my job at the snack stand at Sheep Meadow. And here's a report card - 'Excessive absence!' Isn't that great?"

My publisher was satisfied, but the press wasn't - many reviews for the book questioned my credibility.

I thought things were going to be different this time around - just four weeks ago, my second memoir, Have You Found Her, was released. This time, I'd shared all my source materials with my editor and the lawyers at Random as I was writing the book; fortunately, I'd been detailing most of the events in real time on my blog, and my editor met many of the people I'd written about, so there was little question that I was being truthful.

I've been trying to stay calm and just keep promoting the book, but now every interviewer wants to know about Margaret B. Jones. And nobody wants to know about Janice D. Erlbaum.

"Two years ago I began shopping a manuscript of my experiences as a surgical resident. It wasn't memoir per se (no "I was born in a log cabin in the year 1862" kind of stuff), but a collection of true stories told from my perspective. I got several requests for partials, and I happily FedExed out pages to just under a dozen agents. Then James Frey broke. In the week following his public flensing at the hands of Oprah, I received several emails, letters, and even one phone call from agents who said "in this current climate, first-person based nonfiction's a tough sell." Many suggested trying again in a year. Looks like I missed my window, since the agent I finally found wants to wait this storm out as well. Thank goodness I've got a fondness for the amber liquors."