If anyone had listened: the Exile on Frey from last year

[substitute]

The Exile had James Frey pegged on Day One and even more so on Day Two, even before he was unmasked as a proven fake.

just another dry drunk asshole. They're popular these days. Representative quotes:

Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost.

Frey got those anecdotes the no-risk way: he stole them from a real druggie/criminal author. A much better and more honest one, a guy named Eddie Little-specifically, Frey looted Little's great debut novel, Another Day in Paradise.

The accusation of theft from Eddie Little is interesting; I'll have to find that book.

Thanks to salome_st_john for pointing this one out.

Comments

and I haven't even had any coffee yet today.

[salome-st-john.livejournal.com]

In case you weren't sure just who might absolutely love this book, Patti Davis is defending it on MSNBC.com. Yes, that Patti Davis. Kind of goes along with the whole point made in the second Exile article, doesn't it?

Poor Patti doesn't seem to get the point: It's not that he wrote a book that's essentially fiction and called it a memoir. It's that he got up in front of millions and said THIS IS ME. He claimed this victim status, this trial-by-fire-but-I-got-it-by-the-balls persona. He became an example of hope for others - people who actually needed that hope and who could pay the price if they lost it. And he used the connection people made between the story and him to rise to fame, notoriety, and success. He climbed to the top of the heap using real suffering that was not his own. If his book had been that goddamn brilliant, Patti, then why did no one want to publish it before he went away to rewrite and repackage it as a memoir?

What a bunch of assholes.