JAMES FREY: This is my attorney in Los Angeles.
His name's David Krintzman.
Hey, dude, what's up?
DAVID KRINTZMAN: Hey, how are you?
JAMES FREY: Dude, I have 10 process servers standing
outside of my apartment building saying they're suing
me for intellectual property theft and defamation to God
and slander to Jesus.
Should I call the cops?
Should I call the Hell's Angels?
What should I do?
DAVID KRINTZMAN: Hang on just one second.
JAMES FREY: Can they even sue me for that?
Can you be sued for slandering God?
DAVID KRINTZMAN: No--
God is not a person.
If somebody could try to file a lawsuit, it would get tossed
out immediately.
JAMES FREY: Hey, dude, you know what?
I'm just fucking with you guys.
I'm with "Vice" magazine and they had heard
I make crank calls.
So we decided to crank you.
DAVID KRINTZMAN: [LAUGHING]
JAMES FREY: [CHUCKLING]
DAVID KRINTZMAN: Motherfucker.
JAMES FREY: [CHUCKLING]
DAVID KRINTZMAN: See, this is what I have to fucking deal
with when I represent James Frey.
ROCCO CASTORO: [LAUGHING]
JAMES FREY: Later, dude.
I'll call you later.
DAVID KRINTZMAN: Bye.
JAMES FREY: Bye.
ROCCO CASTORO: So, hi, James.
How are you?
JAMES FREY: I'm good.
How are you?
ROCCO CASTORO: You're doing good today?
JAMES FREY: I'm doing well today, man.
ROCCO CASTORO: So, there's been a lot of press about your
book over the last few days.
And it's about a modern day Messiah who advocates orgies
and drugs and lives for a short time in the subways
underneath New York City.
Now, do you think people are going to try to kill you or
anything like that because of this book?
JAMES FREY: Are people going to try to kill me?
I hope not, man.
I don't want to die, you know.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I mean, some people read the book and don't find it
offensive at all.
And some people read it and say, how long
till you leave America?
I mean, that's part of the fun of releasing a book is seeing
what happens, see if people read it, see if people care,
see how they react.
The book wasn't designed to want to make people kill me.
I tried to write a valid religious document, write a
book about what I really think it might be like if the
Messiah came back to Earth.
People think about the real Christ and about the Bible.
And one of the things that's forgotten, which is one of the
most important things, is that when Christ was on Earth, he
was a radical.
He wasn't part of acceptable society.
He didn't believe in anything that acceptable
society held dear.
He was a radical preacher with a radical message who was
dangerous enough so that he was killed, so that he was
strung up on a cross and killed.
I think if the Messiah were to arrive or Christ to return, he
would be that same type of radical.
ROCCO CASTORO: You said it's your stab
at a religious document.
So what kind of research went into it?
JAMES FREY: I had a number of consultants on the book.
I had an orthodox rabbi here in New York who was a
consultant.
I had a Pentecostal preacher, a Catholic priest, a trauma
surgeon, a criminal defense attorney, a
mental health advocate.
I wanted the book to be right.
I know how I feel about God and how I feel about faith and
how I feel about religion.
But I didn't know the mechanics of it.
There are very specific theories about Messiah.
There are very specific requirements within Judaism to
be considered Messiah.
And I needed to know all that stuff.
ROCCO CASTORO: The book is structured just like the New
Testament, Old Testament.
It's told through different books, through different
narrators who interact with Ben Zion, who's the Messiah.
And some of the books are actually named--
Ruth or Esther.
How much do they have in common with the original?
JAMES FREY: Obviously, I looked a lot at the first two
books of the Bible.
I looked at how the stories were told.
I looked at weird stuff like numbers.
There's a lot of numbers in the Bible.
And they're very specific.
I looked at the Gospels of Christ.
I love that we don't know the story of Christ from his own
perspective.
We just know it from people who knew him.
And I love that the Gospels of Christ are, in and of
themselves, unreliable.
They don't actually match up perfectly.
They tell different stories.
I just tried to think what would a contemporary version
of this be?
So yeah, the book is written entirely from the perspective
of the friends, family, and followers of Ben Zion Avrohom,
also known as the Messiah, also known as the Lord God.
Every chapter of the book is written in a radically
different voice.
The first chapter is a 18-year-old Puerto Rican girl
living in a housing project in the Bronx.
The second chapter is 45-year-old foreman at a
construction site.
The third chapter is a 38-year-old trauma surgeon at
a hospital.
And it was cool to have to literally reinvent how I wrote
with every chapter.
ROCCO CASTORO: When you were compiling research for the
book, did you have any new thoughts about faith?
JAMES FREY: Oh, I have a profound respect for faith.
I mean, if anything, writing the book gave me more respect
for religion and made me think about it more.
But what the book really is is me trying to work out my own
feelings about it.
I've struggled with the idea of God and religion and faith
almost my whole life.
And it's something I've written about every time I've
written a book.
You know, most of "A Million Little Pieces" is about it.
I walk around New York.
And I see things that are incredibly beautiful every day
and incredibly horrific every day.
And you think about, well, why are we even here?
How does my brain work?
Is my brain different from my spirit or my soul?
Do I believe, do I not?
What do I believe in?
How do I reconcile living in the 21st century, living in an
era of nuclear weapons and genetic engineering and living
in an era where we know being gay is not a decision somebody
makes but the way someone's born?
How do we reconcile these ideas--
the physics of Stephen Hawking with, you know, stories of a
man with a big white beard who sits on a chair with a bunch
of dudes judging everybody?
It's really hard for me to reconcile those ideas.
But I think it must be a beautiful thing to believe in
God without a shred of doubt and to have faith.
ROCCO CASTORO: Were you brought up
with any sort of religion?
JAMES FREY: I was baptized Catholic.
And I was confirmed Episcopal.
And my parents took us to church every Sunday
when I was a kid.
I grew up in Cleveland.
But I've never been able to really believe in
that kind of God.
And in a lot of ways, the book is me writing about a God I
could believe in.
If I were to believe in something, it would be
someone like this.
ROCCO CASTORO: I've had a lot of the same struggles.
At the same time, when I find myself in really crappy
situations, I might do something that
could be called praying.
Have you done that any time recently or in the last 10
years or anything like that?
JAMES FREY: Yeah, many times.
I mean, whenever you go through a bad time in your
life, you want some reassurance, or
you want some help.
And when your life's completely out of control, you
want to try to find some way to control it or find some
thing that can control it.
I don't really talk about this.
I've never really talked about it.
But my wife and I had a son who died a couple years ago.
I sat in the hospital.
And I watched him die.
And when that was happening, I would get on my knees every
day and beg God for help, literally beg and plead and
cry and say, help me.
I would say, take me and let my son have a life.
I don't need a life.
Take my life, give it to him.
And while that was happening, I went to churches of
different denominations around New York.
I went to a mosque.
I went to a synagogue.
I went to all these places.
And everywhere I went, I got down on my knees.
And I begged for help.
I begged for something--
for relief, for a sign, for whatever.
And I didn't get anything.
I didn't feel anything.
I don't know if that's because I'm a bad guy in God's eyes.
I don't know if that's because there isn't a God.
I don't know if I did it the wrong way or if I needed to do
it before that to be able to get the help then.
I don't know.
I don't have the answers to any of it.
But I've never gotten a sign.
ROCCO CASTORO: A large part of the book has to do with the
world is ending in some way.
And whether that means flat-out apocalypse, and
everything blows up, or just a complete change of how humans
live, that's what Ben Zion preaches in the book.
And that's the word of God through him.
Do you think we could be close to the end-- like, this could
really be happening right now?
JAMES FREY: I mean, I think we live in a world where a lot of
people have a lot of bombs.
There are bombs that take out tens of millions
of people at a time.
And there's a lot of hatred between all the people who
have these weapons.
And if you look at the conflicts around the world,
most of them are religious conflicts--
the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, the United States.
And Islam as a global religion is, in large
part, a religious conflict.
9/11 was a strike in the name of religion.
And if you look back over the course of history for the last
couple thousand years, most of the big wars have sort of been
land grabs done in the name of religion.
And unless there's some other system that comes in to
replace the ones we have--
which I don't see happening--
nothing's going to change.
There'll be some sort of major conflict tied into religion
that will kill a lot of people.
ROCCO CASTORO: And let's talk about something else that's a
big deal with this book--
how you're publishing it.
So why don't you tell us exactly what your plans are
for releasing this to the world.
JAMES FREY: I tried to write a radical book that wasn't like
anything anybody had done before.
And I'm trying to release it in a radical way.
I've had problems in my career before when I write
controversial material, problems dealing with sort of
corporate entities behind it and how they disavow it or
step away from it once the controversy
reaches a certain point.
So I decided I wasn't even going to
contemplate doing that.
So I thought an art gallery would be a more appropriate
place to publish books.
I got in touch with five of my artist friends--
Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Terry Richardson, Dan Colen,
and Richard Phillips.
And I'm collaborating with them on making these
illuminated manuscripts, like old medieval Bibles, where
they sort of make art that is their reaction to
what they've read.
And then we publish it as sort of a book with a
lot of art in it.
And they're going to be beautiful, astounding,
one-of-a-kind objects.
And I think the future of publishing is that.
We're seeing publishing change very radically right now.
We have the internet.
We have digital devices like the Kindle and the
Nook and the iPad.
And I don't need a publisher to release my
books on those things.
So I sort of arrived that I was going to publish these
beautiful books and limit the number of them and then, at
the same time, let anybody who wants to read the book read it
on a digital device.
I wanted to become a writer to break rules and to get in
trouble and to do things that pushed boundaries.
And I think at some point, literature has become this
precious thing that doesn't value that anymore, even
though most of the historical figures in it only did that.
Something's a book.
And everything else is irrelevant.
What's relevant is when somebody picks up that book
and reads it, how it makes them feel or if it makes them
think or, if at the end of it, they think it
was worth their time.
All the other stuff is just bullshit.