There really isn’t that much to say about “James Frey‘s Morning After,” the profile running in June’s Vanity Fair that Michael Cader didn’t say last night at Publishers Marketplace. Save, perhaps, to note that this bid at redemption may have begun back in February, with a convenient Page Six item in which the newspaper owned by the company that owns the book publishers behind Bright Shiny Morning rechristened Frey as an “outsider.”
Or to wonder whether the article’s fourth-quarter assertion that “it was something of an open secret in the publishing world that the industry had been complicit in the scandal,” based on the idea that everybody “knows” memoirs have some element of fabrication, isn’t a rather melodramatic way of framing the situation. Granted, the “Margaret B. Jones” fiasco demonstrated that not much has changed in the way memoirs get chosen for publication despite all the post-Frey assurances—but “complicit in the scandal”? Whatever sells magazines, I suppose.
(That said, Evgenia Peretz is no doubt right when she suggests the novel “will test to what extent the public is willing to read James Frey the writer, and not, as he puts it, ‘James Frey the asshole,'” so we’ll be looking forward to getting our hands on a copy of Bright Shiny Morning and deciding for ourselves whether it’s any good.)
UPDATE: Though Frey tells Peretz he “doesn’t plan to speak to the press again after this interview,” Sarah Weinman emails that he may be cramming his schedule full of media interaction before calling it quits, as per the Bookseller profile also running this week.