Thursday, January 26, 2006
the story that just won't die
okay, I don't exactly feel sorry for Frey, but still, embarrass & discredit the guy & be done with it already! Instead it looks like the scandal that rocked book clubs all across the land is going to ooze into its second month with Oprah's tearful reversal of her previous support for the book. Man, if you make Oprah cry hot tears of rage on TV, where can you hide? He's a ratfink, but any publicity is good publicity for book sales: when will this story die?
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I feel the opposite. I'm more, Aw, Yeah, Mr. Frey. I think he got what he deserved. Finally. Public Shaming from Oprah? What could be worse? Perhaps it's a bit overkill, but man, that asshole had it coming. I don't feel the slightest bit sorry for the guy, even when he stutters and sits there slack-jawed saying, "I mean, I mean, uh..."
And I'm sure glad Oprah apologized, because she really pissed me off by defending him. I love all she's done for books and writers, don't get me wrong, but her defense of his "emotional truth" bullshit was too much for me.
Did anyone see the actual Oprah? I didn't, but I saw clips on Salon. So uncomfortable to watch. I don't think I can put links in the comments, but here's the URL, in case anyone else is not ready to let this die.
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/
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I have to say I’m tiring of this story as well—yet I keep slurping up news about it. To my mind, the most disturbing aspect of this controversy (or at least, its televised incarnation) was this exchange, from Frey’s appearance on Larry King (on Januray 11):
FREY: I don't think -- I think you could probably find people who would dispute every memoir that was ever published. And a lot of them have been disputed. When Jerzy Kosinski's "Painted Bird" came out and became a big success several years afterwards, people said, "You know what? Jerzy Kosinski never went through the Holocaust." It's happened with a number of recent memoirs. It tends to happen with a lot of the more high-profile memoirs.
KING: And Jerzy killed himself. I'm not suggesting -- Mondovi, Wisconsin, hello. [takes call]
What the
transcript doesn’t convey was the super-dramatic pause Larry made before that zinger about Kosinski. What?!?!? Frey just sat there, mopey-dog-eyed (it had, after all, just been implicitly suggested that he kill himself), and the Squeeze and Jesmimi and I laughed out loud it was so uncomfortable.
I was teaching during Oprah today (though I heard it was pre-empted for some bushie babbling) but here’s a snippet
snippet of their dialogue from Gawker.com:
Update 5: The show is wrapping up. Oprah has tamed her angry inner Harpo. She says to Frey, “I appreciate you being here. It is a difficult time and I hope you were joking about there being a gun backstage—not worth that. [Gawker Ed: Uh, WTF?] Just come clean and that begins the process. Maybe the beginning of another truth…”
I’m admittedly fixated on suicide (not in an intervention way, people) but this strikes me as so strange, and makes me feel so sorry for Frey, in all his sniveling smallness, so different from the author he obviously badly wants to be, BIG and MUSCLY and RAW, and, as he put it in an article (can't figure out how to link it: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/04/19/frey/)
Jesmimi recently reminded me of, a writer who “eat[s] with my hands. Because my best friends are my dogs. And I like pit bulls. And N.W.A. And I love boxing. Writers aren't like that anymore. They're all these guys who have fucking master's degrees and are so 'sophisticated' and 'educated' and ... well, I'm not a guy with a master's degree ... I can write big fat books, but I'm not an effete little guy."
He looks very little in the video clip toochi posted.
In reading all this crap, I came across
a site suggesting that Frey is at “15:01” which is true, sorry to keep the discussion afloat, but I am curious how this must feel for Frey (despite my agreement with toochi that he did *completely* have this coming). On the one hand, he’s back on Oprah and people are still buying his book (maybe this attempt at making people feel sorry for him is a marketing tool too?). On the other, Larry King and Oprah have effectively put him on suicide watch and that anger I felt first learning about this story has since morphed into a whole lot of pity that I know he doesn’t deserve.
Wow. These new developments and revelations in the story of Mr Frey's life sound like excellent material for a memoir. And instead of having made-up convicts as friends, he can write about real-life TV personalities he actually personally knows.
And perhaps he can go on Dr Phil's show for further healing. And that could be another chapter in his new best selling...(insert wavy TV dream sequence transition here)...
This summer I was at a pig roast and incapacitated, but highly sentient, for a few hours in a tent. The party was still well in high gear across the rural Vermont road, and so just about everyone was there, and no one was in the sleeping area, which is why, I'm pretty sure, that girl and that guy felt like they could have the conversation they had fifteen feet away from me, their voices carrying crystal and clear through the cool New England air.
They were dating.
She had walked down to the river looking for him a few hours before.
She had seen him doing what looked to be push-ups over another woman.
She asked him about what he was doing.
He waffled,
and she asked him about what he was doing.
And I heard all of this, and it felt very much like this felt today, watching Oprah skewer Frey, and me sitting there trying to discern whether I felt more Schadenfreude or irk. I still can't tell which.
Can we say right now, to begin with, that it was weird? That interaction? Like watching a break-up or, worse, the Queen Bee have her way with the newly popular kid whom you knew would not be popular for long. Something of spectacle. An arena, lions, shields. I wanted blood. And I recoiled when I saw it spilled.
Certainly it's fucked up what this schmuck did; easily he wins schmuck of the year, and the year's not even a month old. And I'm glad Nan Talese got some, because you know, just know that she knew it was fiction when she decided to publish it. But you know what just might be the best thing to come out of this? A sense in the publishing industry that memoirs are now almost prohibitive in their production costs (including fact-checking), thereby effecting a turn towards at least the label of fiction on books, in turn causing a move to fiction being read, opening up a market, alley oop, for us.
Maybe, if this does indeed turn out to be the aftermath of yesterday's event, we could all celebrate the last Friday of every January as Fr(e)yday [I know, horrible], the day fiction saw its star rise again, even if it rose out of smelly, nasty, putrid ashes.
It's not that I don't want to keep gawking at the Frey spectacle, necessarily, & I'm glad to see Oprah reversing herself, but I really do believe that the end result of all the brou-ha-ha will be bigger sales for Mr. Frey. Doesn't really seem like punishment to me.
I hope Frey doesn't kill himself. What an awful thing that would be.
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