If James Frey’s road has been a rocky one, at least the bumps were diamonds. In the two decades since he got an Oprah dressing down when it turned out he’d fabricated parts of his mega-best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, he founded and sold a booky content farm, dabbled as CEO of an esports company, and collaborated with Lena Waithe on the Queen & Slim story. Also in those years: the rise of autofiction, the death of truth, and a newly unslakable thirst for IP skewering (while sort of celebrating) the ultrarich.
Enter: Next to Heaven (Authors Equity), Frey’s first new book in six years, a Connecticut sex romp–cum–murder mystery with what he calls “big nods” to Jackie Collins, Danielle Steel, and Tom Wolfe. Accordingly, its characters would feel at home in the White Lotus extended universe: a cash-poor WASP art dealer, an aggro hedge funder, a Bitcoin-trading drug dealer who idolizes Eric Trump and Kanye West. That their physical descriptions read like a central-casting call sheet (the women: “tall, thin” or “thin, petite,” with “deep blue eyes” or “bright hazel eyes” or “big brown eyes like mudpies”) doesn’t really matter—and by the introduction of a “tall, buff, black-haired blue-eyed steaming hunk of Connecticut beefcake,” they ascend to something like camp.
The book, to which Frey sold TV rights before the actual manuscript, takes place in fictional New Bethlehem, which bears a striking resemblance to his current home of New Canaan. It has caused something of a stir among members of his social set. At a party, he says, one unwitting attendee whispered to his girlfriend (a countess and equine therapist) that they’d heard the novel was “all real.” He swears the characters aren’t based on actual people—although, of their art collections, “I’ve been in enough houses of hedge fund billionaires to know what they tend to buy.” (For other details he turned to ChatGPT, searching for “the most expensive scotch in the world, or most expensive silverware in the world.”)
The irony of readers sifting for facts isn’t lost on Frey. “If I’m published as memoir or nonfiction, everybody goes through it and tries to figure out what’s not true,” he says. “If I publish it as fiction, everybody goes through it and tries to figure out what is. I sit in the middle and say, ‘I wrote a book. I hope you dig it.’ ”
‘Next To Heaven’ by James Frey
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Vanity Fair: What were your primary influences going into this?
James Frey: During the pandemic,, I had been asked to read Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins and potentially turn it into a television show. And I didn’t end up doing it, but I loved the book. The reading experience of it made me think, You know what, man, maybe you should just write a fun book. Write your version of Jackie Collins. Write your version of Danielle Steel. If I was going to say other books had an influence on it, it would probably be Tom Wolfe and, to a lesser extent, Bret Easton Ellis.
So you started writing it during the pandemic?
No, I didn’t, actually. I was writing another book during the pandemic that I called 477. That was about the ongoing collapse of the United States. And my agent read it and he was like, “I love this, but if you publish it, you’ll probably have to leave the country.” And so last January, I wrote this book and I wrote it really fast. I wrote it in about two months.
Has there been any anxiety in New Canaan leading up to publication?
I think there is some anxiety in the town. When I go out now, it gets brought up everywhere I go. “Oh, I heard a book’s coming out.” I very, very deliberately did not base a single character on anybody real. I always think it’s shitty when people use books to settle scores, and I don’t do it. That’s a lot to put on somebody, man. Do some representation of them in a novel without them knowing about it.
But my girlfriend and I were at a party the other night and she was talking to somebody and they were like, “Oh, that’s James Frey over there.” And she started laughing and she was like, “Yeah, he’s friends with Martha.” Martha was the woman having the party. And the woman was like, “I heard he just wrote this scandalous book that’s based on real people.” And my girlfriend was like, “No, no, it’s not based on anybody real.” And she was like, “No, I heard it’s all real.” And my girl was like, “No, I’m his girlfriend. I live with him. It’s not.”
Does it feel at all ironic to have written a fictional book that now people are very concerned is real?
It’s not the first time it’s happened. When I wrote Bright Shiny Morning [a novel], the first sentence of the book is, “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” Right? Maybe within a week of it being published we started getting calls like, “Some of the facts in this book are wrong.” And I was like, “Did you not read the first sentence of the book, man? Don’t believe anything in it.”
When I write books, I don’t sit down and think, Okay, novel. I just sit down and I’m like, All right, here’s the story I want to tell. Here is how I believe the best way I can tell it is, and I write it. But I know if I’m published as memoir or nonfiction, everybody goes through it and tries to figure out what’s not true. And if I publish it as fiction, everybody goes through it and tries to figure out what is. I sit in the middle and say, “I wrote a book. I hope you dig it.”
So if these characters are not your next-door neighbors, how did they materialize for you?
I thought about a lot of the types of the wealthiest people I’ve met out here. They often tend to be either from very, very, very old, fancy backgrounds, or they tend to be people who’ve made extraordinary sums of money in the last 20 years.
But I started with the plot, and I started with the environment. Part of the idea was I live in a bubble. I live in one of the most insulated communities in the world. And I’ve never really seen anybody write about living inside of that bubble in a way that felt authentic to me. And these bubbles are the way they are for a reason. It’s to keep people out and to keep privacy and discretion as rigorous as possible.
Do you read your reviews?
I do generally read them. I tend not to carry them with me, if that makes sense.
In a 2017 New York Times review of Katerina, Melissa Broder wrote of its sex scenes, “One wonders if our protagonist knows what cunnilingus is at all.” Charlie in Next to Heaven definitely does. [An early character description reads, “Charlie truly and deeply loved eating pussy.”] Was that a response to the review?
[Laughs] No. Not in any way whatsoever. No.
Your relationship to criticism—that feeling that you don’t carry it with you—has that changed over the years?
I’ve been pretty good about it for a long, long time. When I first started writing, when my first book came out, which was in 2003, I think one of the harshest things was learning to manage criticism. I think my job as a writer is to write books and critics’ jobs are to criticize books, and I accept what they say, whether it’s good or bad. It’s an opinion. And I don’t react as a writer to them in any way whatsoever. I don’t write things because of something somebody has said. I have pretty thick armor at this point. And I do believe in critics’ rights to say whatever they want. I also got thrown into the fire in ways that I don’t think a lot of people do, so learning to handle that and learning to accept it was something I was forced to do. And I’m cool with it.
My job’s to write books, and I know going in that generally, if the pattern of my career holds, half the reviews will be good and half the reviews will be awful. And half the people who read it will love it and half the people who read it will say some unpleasant thing about me. And frankly, I like it that way.
I read in one of the announcements that you had other books that you were interested in writing in this vein.
Yeah, I think I’m going to write four more of them. The next one’s in Tribeca, the one after that is in East Hampton, the one after that is in Bel Air, and the one after that is in Malibu. I have figured them all out. I can tell you what they are, I don’t know if you want to write ’em, but—
All yours.
I’m going to write a series of dirty, funny murder mysteries about terrible rich people. About how money distorts people’s perceptions and it distorts everything. I think money is the most powerful, most addictive, and most destructive drug on the planet.
Have you had this much fun writing any of your previous books?
This was definitely a new feeling. I’ve never written anything close to as fast. I think part of the speed with which I wrote it was a result of the joy with which I wrote it. I have very specific routines in my life. I wake up every morning around 6:45. I meditate for about 20 minutes or half an hour, and then I usually go for a walk for about 45 minutes to an hour. And during the time I was writing the book, it was all I could think about. I would wake up and think about it. I would walk and think about it. And I would very much look forward to being in front of the machine writing all day. And I probably worked 12 to 14 hours a day for those two months writing it.
Are you having the same experience with the next book?
I’m hoping to. I haven’t written the next book. I’m going to start it soon. I wrote the television pilot of this book and I’m writing a movie for Josh Brolin right now about Charles Bukowski.
Were you thinking of the possible screen treatment when you were writing the book itself?
I actually wasn’t. I very much consider myself a book writer who knows how to write television and films. But I always think about these things as a book and only as a book, and if I’m fortunate enough to get a movie or a TV deal, I am. In some cases, I’ve never sold the rights to my books because I didn’t want them to be turned into anything but a book. But I was really focused on making the best book I could, and then I showed it to a friend of mine in Los Angeles, who I’ve worked with for a long, long time over many years, named Mike Larocca. He produced the Avenger movies, he produced Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I was fortunate enough that he wanted to take it off the market before we really showed it to anybody else.
Did your company, Full Fathom Five, change or influence how you think of publishing your own books?
We published about 240 [books]. We have 40 New York Times bestsellers. The experience of starting and running that company doesn’t influence how I write at all, and it doesn’t influence how I market or try to sell a book at all. I started that company because I’ve had a very tumultuous writing career. I can’t say I was prepared for all of it, and I can’t really say that I enjoyed all of it. And after four books, A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning, and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, I just wanted to do something else. I learned immense amounts about running a business, about growing a business. I then went to work with the people who bought the company from 2017 to 2022. In 2022, I became the CEO of a video game company for a couple years. I was just doing other things. I was just chasing other interests. I do what I want when I want to do it, and I didn’t want to write anymore. I didn’t want to be a public figure. I didn’t want to be written about.
And then I missed writing, and I missed the life of a writer. I missed the solitude. I missed the challenge. I missed the intensity of focus that you have when you’re writing a book. I missed publishing. I missed publishing people. I missed talking about books. My whole life in most ways has revolved around reading books and writing books. And as I got older, I sort of thought, You have a limited time left, what do you want to do with it? And I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write again.
In an interview a couple of years ago, you said that you were using generative AI to work on 477. Did you also use AI for Next to Heaven?
I don’t use generative AI to write ever, just so we’re clear. I use AI as a writer the same way I used to use Google. I’m looking at my AI right now. We can go to the previous seven days. Earlier today, I asked it, “What is the betting area at a racetrack called?” It said, “It’s called the cashier’s window, or the payout window. Technically in zoning laws it’s called the waging area or the wager area.”
It helps me immensely because it’s vastly faster than a search engine. But I don’t use generative AI to actually compose sentences or put together the text. I mean, I guess I do use it to put together the text of the book. But when we were talking earlier about Next to Heaven, and I said, “I would look up what’s the most expensive silverware ever made,” AI just gives you the answer a lot fucking faster.
Are you using ChatGPT or something else?
Yeah. I use ChatGPT.
After I read Next to Heaven, I prompted, “Give me a history of a fictional town called New Bethlehem, which is similar to New Canaan,” and it did spit out something that was pretty structurally similar to that chapter of the book in terms of like, “The town was founded this era, and then by World War II this was happening. Here’s when the railroads came.”
I didn’t use AI for the town history.
Oh, interesting.
We have a New Canaan Historical Society that has a very complete history of the town that’s maybe seven minutes from where I lived, and I just walked over there. And like any museum, they literally have the things on the walls where you can read the history of the town, and I took pictures of them with my phone. But no—AI is helpful, man. It helps me with a lot of things.
It doesn’t make you nervous at all?
I think it makes me nervous to think that AI might potentially replace human writers, but using AI as a tool to make me a better writer or a more efficient writer, or to help me use funnier words or to get information I don’t know, or have, I don’t have any issue with it.
I’m just waiting for my robot overlords. In the last decade, there’s been a proliferation of celebrity book clubs. Would you ever participate in one again?
[Pause. Laughs.] I participate in a normal book club. But yeah, I would participate in a celebrity book club. I don’t even have bad feelings about the one I did participate in. It was a profound and life-altering and extraordinary experience, even though it wasn’t always fun.
It was decades ago at this point. Is it something that you think about now?
No.
No.
I don’t really ever think about the book club. One of the things that brings me great humility and—I’m not sure what the word is, maybe I should ask AI—joy, or satisfaction, is probably four days a week, I still get letters from people who have read A Million Little Pieces and have had their lives profoundly altered in some way because of that book.
And you asked me what I hope readers get from me, and that’s it. I want them to remember the experience of reading my words, and I want those words to somehow change how they think or they feel or they live or they laugh or they fuck or they go about their life. And for me, when I get those letters, it’s always humbling and it’s always kind of lovely.
With such a big cast of characters, was there one who you miss, or who felt like the heartbeat of the book?
I think Devon is the heartbeat of the book, for sure. The most fun I had writing a character was Charlie. And you asked if Charlie is me earlier, I think?
No, I didn’t ask if Charlie was you!
I love playing hockey. There’s a scene with a KenTaco [Kentucky Fried Chicken/Taco Bell] in there. My kids and my girlfriend make fun of me all the time because I love KenTaco so much. If there is one thing in the book based absolutely entirely on something real, it’s that KenTaco on Westport Avenue in Norwalk, Connecticut. I think I put a picture of it on my Instagram not long ago. But I thought Charlie in a lot of ways is the beating heart of the book. He’s funny. He’s an outsider. He lives according to his own rules. And I think he’s the sweetest and kindest—and as weird as it sounds to say about a hockey enforcer—the most sensitive of all of them.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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