The only questions were who and when, not if and why. Answer number one: Laura Barton and the Guardian. Answer number two: today, a good nine months after The Smoking Gun broke the story of Frey’s plagiarism. On that particular subject, James Frey shows that he doesn’t quite get what really happened. “I was sorta shocked by it,” he says. “And I was upset by it and surprised by it. Just surprised that the book would be put under that much scrutiny, and picked apart so thoroughly. Throughout this I’ve been surprised by the venom with which people have come after me.” That said, he doesn’t exactly blame TSG. “The guys that work there have a job,” he says. “Their job is to get people to come to their website, to look at what they do. I just never thought that I was that big a target. I never thought that I would garner that much attention, that I was that big a deal.”
No, he wasn’t that big a target. Except that if you show inconsistent behavior around a guy who spent much of his journalistic career investigating bigger fish than Frey ever will be – and by that I mean the mafia – and keep on doing so, then don’t be surprised if he decides to apply the same journalistic instincts towards even the small fish. But then, Frey would much rather be that little fish than the notoriously famous man he’s become. Especially since he’s still bewildered by what happened, especially when his agent dropped him and his publisher cancelled his contract. “I mean, that’s sort of the irony, y’know? My agent said her integrity was questioned, but it wasn’t questioned enough for her to stop taking the money.”
Which leads nicely into what’s already the piece’s big pullquote, when Frey discusses how after signing with Doubleday, the process of editing altered the book further: timelines shifted, characters were erased, segments rearranged. “So the idea that nobody at the publishing company knew it was a manipulated manuscript is an absurd idea,” he said. “I remember somebody at the publishing company told me that if the book’s 85% true there’s no problem. Certainly that standard wasn’t then applied to it later.”