A Million Little Lies

Surely, like anyone who lived in St. Joseph at the time of the accident, Frey knew that two girls had died in the crash. But for the fabulist's narrative purposes, Janie Hall needed to be thrown under that C&O locomotive.

After learning of the accident the following day, "I got blamed by her Parents and by her friends and by everyone else in that fucking hellhole," Frey claims. "If she hadn't lied and if I hadn't helped her, it would not have happened. If we hadn't gone to the Theater, she would not have gone on that date." Sure, a couple of mangled girls landed in a hospital morgue, but that's narrative gold in the hands of James Frey.

The car's driver was unhurt and everyone felt sorry for him. Instead, it was poor Jimmy Frey who became the object of St. Joseph's scorn:

I got taken down to the local Police Station and questioned. That was the way it worked there. Blame the fuck-up, feel sorry for the football Hero. Vilify one forever, forget the other had anything to do with it. I took a lot of punches for that bullshit, and every time I threw a punch back, and I threw one back every single time, I threw it back for her. I threw it back as hard as I fucking could and I threw it back for her.

Standing in that Hazelden shower, Frey wishes he could again smell Michelle, touch her hair, tell her he loves her because, "I did and I do and I never did it when she was still alive."

Frey's alternate reality, as you might have guessed, is not reflected in the final 16-page police report on the 1986 fatalities. There is no mention of him in the document, though several other St. Joseph High School students were questioned by investigators. No person interviewed said anything about Sanders going to the movies that evening. The chief police investigator, Dennis Padgett, told TSG, "I don't remember Mr. Frey. I don't recognize the name." Asked if a key witness like Frey could have been interviewed by him or other probers and not be referred to in the final report, Padgett answered, "Not typically, no."

While Sanders, who demonstrably was a real person, is another character--like Leonard or Lilly--who died before she could see Frey enjoy fame and wealth (or even visit his Big Jim Industries web site), her parents are still alive. And Bill and Marianne Sanders say that Frey created a meaningful relationship with their daughter where, the couple believes, one did not exist.

Sanders was a senior, Frey just a junior, so he deftly skipped a grade to better appropriate her family's tragedy. And since it would be hard to claim "Michelle" as his beautiful protector and only friend five years after arriving in town, Frey instead turns back the odometer and has her coming to his rescue at age 12, only months after he landed in that verdant Michigan "hellhole."

The Sanders family learned of "A Million Little Pieces" late last year when they returned to Michigan (they now live in New York) for a funeral. A relative had heard about the book via "Oprah" and told Marianne that they suspected the train accident described by Frey was the one that took Melissa's life.

Marianne began to read the book, but did not recognize many of the details surrounding her own daughter's death. "Everything that I believe he wrote, even about my daughter...was not an actual, the way the accident happened or anything," she told TSG. "I never heard his name in connection with it."

Sanders said that she did not think Frey's name ever came up in connection with Melissa's death and, "I don't believe that he was ever actually questioned in regard to the accident because he had nothing to do with it."

She disputed Frey's claim that he had always "been pleasant and polite" in the company of her and her husband. She could recall meeting him only once before Melissa's death and believed that Frey dropped off a condolence card after the accident. They may have been acquaintances, she said, and might have ridden on the same school bus.

As for driving Frey and her daughter, who was not a cheerleader, to the movies the night Melissa died, Sanders said that did not happen. "When I read that I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true." She added, "I just figured he embroidered a few things...I mean I'm sure not every single thing he said in there is gonna be true, do you think?"

In an e-mail exchange, Bill Sanders told TSG that on the night of the accident, a Saturday, "Janie stopped by and picked Melissa up. Melissa told me they were going out and she would be home around 12:00 midnight. I have never met Mr. Frey and I never drove him anywhere."

Asked about St. Joseph residents purportedly turning on Frey after the crash, Marianne Sanders replied, "No, I don't think that part's true at all." She added, "I never heard anything like that after it happened. As far as I know his name never came up in anything." TSG spoke with Sanders last month, a particularly tough time of the year for her family. Three years after Melissa's death, her twin brother Mark was killed in a New York auto accident. "It's very hard to lose children," she said.

In a Q&A section on Winfrey's web site, Frey recently answered a viewer's question about whether he ever spoke about the death of his high school "girl friend" with his parents or a Hazelden staff psychologist. "I discussed it a bit with my parents when it happened, but not that much. I have often kept the things that hurt me the most to myself. I don't know if that's because they hurt so much to talk about, or if I just want them to be mine and mine alone."

That would be one explanation.

When Oprah Winfrey decided to place her book club's coveted seal of approval on "A Million Little Pieces," she further cemented James Frey's place near the top of the publishing heap. At least in terms of sales, if not literary achievement. The book has reportedly sold more copies than any other title chosen by the TV star. He has embraced Winfrey with gusto, calling her selection of his book an "honor." Quite the opposite of the forearm shiver Jonathan Franzen, another contemporary New York author, gave Winfrey in 2001 when she picked his novel, "The Corrections," for her book club.

Frey's nonfiction memoir's roaring success (and that of its sequel "My Friend Leonard") has earned him millions of dollars and allowed for the kind of luxuries that few young authors ever see--a $2.55 million Manhattan apartment, an Amagansett summer house, and first-class travel. And, as silly as it sounds, Frey has become something of a literary rock star, attracting crowds at book signings that jam stores to capacity and prompt comparisons to established draws like David Sedaris and Dave Eggers.

He has written the screenplay for "A Million Little Pieces" and has said that the film is being co-produced by Brad Pitt and directed by Mark Romanek. Frey is more than happy to tick off the top-shelf Hollywood actors (some of whom he counts as friends) up for the role of him: Ryan Gosling, Tobey Maguire, Orlando Bloom, Josh Hartnett, and Jake Gyllenhaal. "Whoever they're gonna choose I'll be happy with. I'm much more worried with the studio staying true to the story than I am about who they put in it," Frey told Winfrey. Now in between books, he's working on a screenplay about the Hell's Angels for director Tony Scott.

At a packed appearance last month at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square (on his web site, Frey estimated the audience at 1200), he proudly told the crowd that "nobody who has been in either of the books has ever had a problem with anything I wrote, even when I didn't necessarily write good things about them." As for future plans, he said he was done writing memoirs. He told Publishers Weekly in an October interview that his next work, a novel, would be "a big, ambitious 500- or 600-page book about life in contemporary Los Angeles."

He noted, "I'm looking forward to showing people that I can write fiction."