'Million Little Pieces' author Frey fills 'Slander' class with profanity

Expletives flew freely as controversial celebrity author James Frey joined English professor Sophie Gee in her class, ENG 231: Dirty Words: Satire, Slander and Society, on Tuesday morning.

Frey is perhaps best known for his New York Times bestseller “A Million Little Pieces.” The book, chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club list, angered many readers, including Winfrey, who originally believed it to be a truthful memoir of a young man’s recovery from alcoholism and drug abuse, only to later learn that the book contained fictitious events.

Frey reflected on how the controversy affected him personally.

“I definitely get judged differently,” Frey said, later adding, “I remember the day after my second Oprah experience. My friend called and told me to Google myself. There were 9,000 articles about me in a single day. All of them called me a liar ... a dirt bag.”

He explained that he never intended for the book to be understood as a memoir of real events.

“I definitely made mistakes in how I promoted the book, but not in the way I wrote it,” he said. “I personally think the word memoir is bullshit. We took it as a novel, the publisher wanted to publish it as a memoir. I just saw it as a work of art.”

Frey was persistent in distinguishing himself as an artist rather than just an ordinary writer.

“The literary world is a very polite society ... everyone’s dying to be published ... no one breaks the rules anymore,” Frey said. “Creating art is all about breaking rules ... all about getting in trouble.”

Frey explained that his book was “designed to be a glop of spit in the face of self help” instead of the inspirational story that many readers took it to be.

Frey noted that it is important to write as freely as one would speak, and mirroring his written prose, he used profane language throughout the lecture. He added that he would like to write a book so controversial that it gets banned, though he acknowledged that few books are banned today.

He added, however, that “offense for the sake of offensiveness is stupid. When I say I want to write a book that gets banned, it’s about creating a piece of art that shatters the world.”

Frey did note, however, that his writing is very personal.

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“It’s not that I care so little,” he said. “I care profoundly about my books. I don’t often care what people say or write about me, but I care about what I do; I care about my writing.”

Gee said in an interview that she invited Frey to visit her class because she wanted her students to meet an author that she finds engaging.

“One of the things I want Princeton students to think about from this lecture is that literature is disruptive, it’s progressive, it’s active,” Gee explained. “It makes things and it breaks things. That’s why Frey is so interesting to me. He is so active” she added.

One student, Ann-Marie Elvin ’12, said she found Frey’s attitude refreshing.

“I’m taken aback, in a good way,” she said. “It’s a breach in expectations that he is so unconventional. He doesn’t spend too much time caring what others think.”