From Memoir meltdown to dystopian excess: Jame Frey returns with a roar

Like a lot of people, I read A Million Little Pieces when it came out. I read it quickly, swept up by its manic rhythm and gut-punching candour. It felt raw, painful, and honest. 

Then came the controversy: the revelations that much of the book, which had been marketed as a memoir, had been fabricated, culminating in a televised public shaming by Oprah Winfrey in 2006. It wasn’t a memoir at all. More of a novel memoir mashup. A novior, if you like.

It was a moment that seemed to draw a line under Frey's literary future, banishing him to the margins of credibility. He was cancelled.

Now, Frey is back. Or trying to be. His new novel. Yep, it’s definitely a novel, called Next to Heaven, that marks a return not just to publishing but to the spotlight. It’s not a quiet comeback. The launch party in Chelsea this month was part carnival, part ego flex, with its chaotic energy and provocations. Frey isn’t just writing again—he’s performing, reclaiming space, and demanding attention. There’s a sense that he’s not just publishing a book, but staging a reclamation.

The book itself is a gaudy piece of speculative fiction saturated with sex, violence, and golden-toothed billionaires. It follows a disgraced artist navigating a hyper-capitalist dystopia, peppered with Frey’s trademark defiance and a relentless pursuit of excess. Critics have panned it for retrograde gender politics, gratuitous shock value, and a tone-deaf bravado that feels more calculated than cathartic. Yet it’s also heading for a TV adaptation, reportedly in early development—a detail that hints Frey understands the modern media game better than most.

Frey has positioned himself as a martyr of cancel culture, the misunderstood provocateur unfairly cast out for blurring literary lines. It’s a savvy narrative, if not a terribly nuanced one. In Next to Heaven, that defiance plays out in full—the language is clenched, the metaphors muscular, the worldview blunt. It’s not literature that asks to be loved; it dares you to dismiss it.

Literary authenticity, cancel culture, and the ghost of Yellowface

It’s hard not to think of Yellowface by R.F. Kuang when watching Frey’s attempted reinvention. While Kuang’s novel skewers the publishing industry's moral gymnastics and obsession with authorship, it also explores what happens when truth becomes a commodity. Frey’s earlier scandal and current posture as the anti-hero of literature seem to echo the very themes Kuang teased apart—authorship, authenticity, and who gets to write what. The difference, of course, is that Yellowface is self-aware satire. Frey appears to be playing it straight, but the spectacle is no less pointed.

So what do we do with a comeback like this? Can a disgraced author rewrite his story in fiction? Or are some reputations too deeply ingrained to revise? I’m not sure. But I do know that watching Frey try, spectacularly and chaotically, is its own strange thrill. Like reading A Million Little Pieces for the first time, it’s impossible to look away—even if you sometimes wish you could.