Reality Hunger (14 page)

I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He should have said,
Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be
. He could have talked about the parallel between a writer’s persona and the public persona that Oprah presents to the world. Instead, he showed up for his whipping.

When Frey appeared on
Oprah
the final time, performing hara-kiri, many of the nation’s newsrooms were tuned in. Even choosing what to include in a straightforward memoir involves a substantial exercise of creative license; journalists, though, don’t seem too hip to this way of thinking: bad for their business, and they have a monopoly (had a monopoly) on popular discourse.

In the aftermath of the
Million Little Pieces
outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book: for hardcover owners, it was page 163; those with paperback copies were required to actually tear off the front cover and send it in. Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the
book with the belief it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel.

In 2009, Oprah reversed herself again, apologizing to Frey for publicly humiliating him. Meanwhile, Frey, working with another writer, “anonymously” shopped around a young adult novel called
I Am Number Four
, which is about a group of nine alien teenagers on a planet called Lorien (Frey was born and raised in Cleveland, not far from Lorain, OH, a small city that is predominantly African-American and is Toni Morrison’s hometown). Attacked by a hostile race from another planet, the nine aliens and their guardians evacuate to Earth, where three are killed. The protagonist, a Lorien boy named John Smith, hides in Paradise, OH, disguised as a human, trying to evade his predators and knowing he’s next on their list. Frey is also working on
Illumination: The Last Testament of the Holy Bible
, a novel about a lapsed Orthodox Jew who suffers an accident and wakes up thinking he’s the Messiah.

Capitalism implies and induces insecurity, which is constantly being exploited, of course, by all sorts of people selling things. Therapy lit, victim lit, faux-helpful talk shows, self-help books: all of these prey on our essential insecurity. The great book, though—Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet
, say—takes us down into the deepest levels of human insecurity, and there we find that we all dwell. Autobiography at its very best is a serious handshake or even full embrace between the writer willing to face him/herself and the reader doing the same. At a lower level, it’s a sentimental narrative about fall and forgiveness.

reality

These are the facts, my friend, and I must have faith in them.

What is a fact? What’s a lie, for that matter? What, exactly, constitutes an essay or a story or a poem or even an experience? What happens when we can no longer freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience?

During the middle of a gig, Sonny Rollins sometimes used to wander outside and add the sound of his horn to the cacophony of passing cabs.

Have you ever heard a song that makes you feel as good as Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips—Part 2”? I haven’t. It’s so
real
. When you listen to the song, you can hear a guy in the band
yelling, “What key? What key?” He’s lost. But then he finds the key, and
boom
. Every time I hear that guy yelling, “What key?” I get excited.