In the case of James frey that of the pseudonym has more reason to be than in any other author. Because those who know him discover in Frey an author with a great position between the existential and the social. While who knows Pittacus lore as an umbrella of creators of the Lorien Legacies (captained by Frey) is rather a reader of a combined science fiction with epic fantasies ... And there is no difference.
So yes, it is best to have two names under which to shelter the creative split personality. In this blog we stay more with the Frey channeled towards that literature made pure chronicle, intrahistory of his time. A narrative interested in the stripping of the soul, in that overwhelming impressionism of unfiltered vitality.
Temptations of youth to surrender with the wise certainty that it is the only thing left and the assumption of the consequences. The story of vices and passions; the uncomfortable counterweight of regrets and guilt. At the end of the day the contradiction breaking through once more. With the feeling that only in this way, allowing oneself to be carried away by opposite poles, can one go on assuming that one is born to die. The great lie or the great truth, depending on how you look at it and face it.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by James Frey
In a thousand steps
The day that James Frey wanted to be Holden caulfield started writing this novel. Things went wrong more than once, like Caulfield himself. Only in Frey's case his testimony was intended to arrive with the force of extreme truth, while in Holden's case everything was a tremendous fiction about the certainty of adolescence.
Imagine that you wake up on an airplane. You don't know where you've been or where you're going. You have four missing teeth, a broken nose and a cut on your cheek. You go without a wallet, you don't have a job and the police are looking for you. Imagine that you have been an alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three.
What would you do? At twenty-three, Frey entered a detox center. Destroyed physically and mentally in an almost irremediable way, he had to face a difficult decision: accept that he would not reach the age of twenty-four or drastically change the course of his life. Surrounded by patients in the same situation, Frey fought against the dogma of "how to recover" to find his own way and decide what future, if any, he wanted to achieve.
Your testimony, In a thousand steps, became a literary phenomenon, until a long investigation discovered that the author had fictionalized more than one passage of the book, which sparked a great controversy. Yet it remains a hypnotic and illuminating reading about a man whose raging drive for self-destruction is matched only by his inexhaustible desire to survive.
Katerina
The old sensations that made the skin crawl can be recovered through memory or literature, there is no other choice. It is not that everything that may come is not good, but the lost paradises of the first times will never find a future replica. So let us relive in the echoes of this novel that yesterday, not because it is past but because it was glorious, capable of giving us back at least a breath of what was.
James Frey takes us to the Paris of the 90s to tell us the overwhelming love story of an explosive cocktail: a young American aspiring writer who has just arrived in the city of light to follow in the footsteps of Henry Miller and a young Norwegian model who is about to achieve fame; both reckless, impulsive, addicted, and deeply in love. Twenty-five years pass and the writer now lives in Los Angeles, he is rich and famous, but he feels paralyzed and just wants to smash his car against a tree, until an anonymous message takes him back to life, and possibly to love, that abandoned years ago.
Katerina is an autobiographical novel that shows the scorching, arrogant and at the same time naive gaze of a young man who is not afraid to set the world and his own life on fire in search of a dream, without taking into account the possible damages. "The Bad Boy of America" ​​is reborn from its ashes with the same raw and authentic emotion, and the same percussive and dazzling style, that elevated him - and then almost destroyed him - in his controversial "memoirs", In a thousand pieces.
The last testament
Sometimes I think that all of us who have been educated in Christianity have thought of a new Jesus Christ back in this world to be once again set apart and if not already crowned with thorns if at least repudiated and abandoned in his madness under any bridge ... Frey the idea matured ... in its own way.
What would you do if you found out that the Messiah lived today? That he lived in New York. To sleep with men and get women pregnant. To help the dying die, to heal the sick. Defy the government and condemn the sacred. What would you do if you met him? What if your life changed? Would you believe Yes?
James Frey is a writer who plays with the truth. Revolutionary and controversial, he had to go into exile from the United States and hide in France. His books live on that ambiguous line that exists between reality and fiction, and now he has written his best work so far, the most provocative: The last testament. Frey's goal is not to retell the story of Christ but to create a new mythology that has something important to say in this world of nuclear weapons, genetic manipulation, and the internet. The last testament will change you. It will hurt you. It will open your eyes to the world we live in. We have waited two thousand years for the arrival of the Messiah. He was here and this book is the story of his life.
