CARPE MEDIA

by Emily W. Sussman

Declaring herself the Queen of All Media (no, not him) this bitch took it upon herself to give me a rapid-fire series of nasty spanks on national television.

(Incidentally, what the hell does she know about literature?)

It hurt.

But boy, oh boy, now I’m more confused than ever. I muster up the courage to write a new book (fiction, this time), and Janet Maslin gives me a boner of a review.

“He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.”

Six weeks later, Walter Kirn delivers a whooping second only to Oprah. No, make that worse — more like an all-out ass-stomping. I have the welts on my butt to prove it.

“Frey provides a World Book’s worth of trivia concerning the geography, demographics and social history of Los Angeles. “In 1895, all 23 of the incorporated banks in Los Angeles County are robbed at least once.” “In 1968, Robert Kennedy is shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.” These inserts are supposed to have an ironic, ominous quality that haunts and complicates the imagined stories. Instead they remind us, repeatedly and naggingly, of the thinness of Frey’s inventions, which rival them for arid tedium, proving that this stranger to the truth is also, at least for the moment, a stranger to fiction.”

I could get mad, but instead, I’m all kinds of sad. Kirn’s a talented guy, and hell, anyone who has the balls to marry someone so closely related to Margot Kidder has gotta be braver than any addict turning himself over to rehab.

–James Frey, as told to me in a Sudafed-induced dream sequence