James Frey's Introduction to "Reality Matters"
Choire Sicha: I have just received in the mail the galley of an anthology, released today, about reality television, which is called “Reality Matters” and which has a foreword by James Frey.
Tom Scocca: You have never.
Choire: I have so! (And Will Leitch and others are reading from it tonight in New York!)
Tom: What have you learned from it? What does James Frey have to say about reality television?
Choire: ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE ME OPEN THIS?
Tom: Well, I can’t open it!
Choire: I have reservations with discussing James Frey at all, due to discussions about him getting extremely distorted and misunderstood. But, since this book is here…
Choire: His introduction is actually pretty lively and funny?
Choire: And then he writes:
Choire:
I learned the great secret of reality television, and of writing, and of every other form of narrative self-documentation and narrative storytelling: that it’s all fake, every second of it, every minute of it, every page of it, every episode of it. It’s all fucking fake. Manipulated and embellished and edited. Fake so that it can be real. Structured and polished. Fake so that we can consume it and connect to it and identify with it and enjoy it. Made to entertain. We call it the real world, but it’s not. It’s all fucking fake.
Choire: He goes on a bit.
Choire: “And to me, at least, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Actually quite the opposite. I revel in reality’s fakeness.”
Choire: This bit is prefaced by his realization that when he started writing about his life, he realized “it wasn’t enough to just document it or portray it in some objective way.”
Tom: So now we are all living in James Frey’s world.
Choire: Well, he is, I guess?
Choire: I’m not.
Choire: I sort of don’t begrudge him this viewpoint?
Choire: It seems rational even? And he’s welcome to this belief!
Choire: And to this practice.
Choire: It’s not for me. And I don’t think he should universalize it, but that’s fine.
Tom: It is a bit of a funny stance for a fellow to arrive at after tattooing “FTBSITTTD” on his arm, though.
Tom: I guess he can just enclose the D and make it an B? “Feel the Bull-Shit, It’s Time to Throw Bullshit”?
Choire: I can see why all sorts of people give up on reality.
Choire: The influence of fake reality IS pervasive, and if the stuff in this anthology gets to that, great.
Choire: And actually maybe Frey is the right person to introduce this!
Tom: Sometimes stunt-casting works.
Choire: Sometimes you’re actually the expert in a field.