How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S2, Ep3 How to Fail: James Frey

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

This week on How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, we're joined by the author James Frey who also just so happens to be my first American guest (hello, USA! I heart you!). Frey has written four critically acclaimed novels, and his fifth - Katerina, a sweeping love story set between 2018 Los Angeles and 1992 Paris - has just been published.But he's probably as well known for his notoriety as his talent. In 2003, Frey published A Million Little Pieces, a memoir of his criminal past and addiction to crack cocaine. An instant bestseller, it was picked by Oprah Winfrey for her influential book club. But when it was subsequently shown that Frey had fabricated large portions, Oprah brought him back on her show to give him an exceptionally public dressing down that made headines around the world.This is a man who has been a literary rock-star and a literary pariah; someone who has experienced public failure on a level most of us couldn't even begin to comprehend. He joins me to discuss what that felt like, what he learned from the fallout, what the difference is between factual truth and truth in fiction, living with addiction, what he has learned from failure, and he tells me about his peronsal motto: 'Fail Fast, Fail Often'. Along the way, he also reveals whether he'd vote for Oprah if she ran for President and his unlikely support for the England football team. How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and sponsored by 4th Estate Books Katerina by James Frey is out now published by John Murray Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayChris Sharp @chrissharpaudio4th Estate Books @4thEstateBooks     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. This season of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is sponsored by Fourth Estate Books. In What We're Teaching Our Sons, Owen Booth unpacks received notions of masculinity in a funny, sometimes surreal, and very touching way. Exploring everything from heartbreak to volcanoes, friendship to tarantulas, violence to the Big Bang, and the eternal question of why men find it so hard to express their feelings.

If any book can tell me the answer to that, I will certainly be reading it, and I think you should too. You can find out more about what we're teaching our sons at forthestate.co.uk. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've

learned from failure. James Fry is not like other writers. That, at least, is what his publishers once declared in the blurb accompanying one of his five novels. And it's true, he's not. He writes sentences that fizz with electricity and spill onto the page. He ignores the conventional rules of grammar. But he's also not like other writers because he's as notorious for his failure as he is known for his talent. In 2003, Fry published A Million Little Pieces, a memoir of his criminal past and addiction to crack cocaine. An instant bestseller, it was picked by Oprah Winfrey for her influential book club. But a subsequent investigation by the Smoking Gun website found large portions of the book were fabricated. Fry was publicly humiliated, sued for damages,

and hauled back to the Oprah Winfrey show to explain himself in the full glare of primetime television. It was an experience he later called an ambush. This then is a man who has lived through the dazzling heights of literary fame and the painful lows of being a publishing pariah. New York is where he still lives, which is why this interview was conducted over FaceTime. His latest novel, Katerina, is a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018. I always wanted to be the outlaw, he said in an interview in 2011,

and that's, to a certain certain extent how I've lived. I've failed more than probably anybody you've ever had on the show. Well, that's not true, but I'm so excited to have you on this. So James, one of the things that I have read you say in the past is that you like to break rules, not only in terms of how you write, but in terms of how you live. Is that right? And where does that come from? I don't think I have to live or write or work or think in ways that I'm told I'm supposed to. I think that's silly. I think every human being has the inalienable right to live and decide what rules work for them and what rules don't. I mean, where that comes from is I grew up a punk rock kid in the 80s, right?

I grew up in the age of Reagan, which in some ways is like the age of Trump, but not quite as extreme, but where the country was essentially divided. And on one side, there were people who said, you have to follow all the rules. And on the other side, there was this sort of rebellion. In my time, the rebellion was expressed through how the kind of music we listened to and the kind of clothes we wore and the fact that we actively broke rules for the fuck of it. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast?

Absolutely. I mean, I encourage it. I grew up with the fuck of it. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast? Absolutely. I mean, I encourage it. I grew up with a fuck you attitude. Fuck you. I don't have to do what you tell me to do. I don't have to think. I don't have to dress. I don't have to speak how you tell me I'm supposed to. And as I got older, that never left me. So when I was starting to learn how to write books, I taught myself how to do it, in some cases, I've absolutely broken, violated rules and conventions deliberately. In some cases, it was just accidental because I wasn't taught how to do it. But if you look at how I use grammar, right? I can write with perfect grammar if I want to. I just think it's stupid. It's stupid that somebody tells me I have to follow these rules

when they don't feel right to me in my heart, right? And so I write in a way that feels true to my heart and to my brain and to what I'm trying to say and how I'm trying to say it. In other cases, like with paragraph indentations, I don't ever use them and I never have. And that was almost an accidental violation of rules because I don't ever use them, and I never have. And that was almost an accidental violation of rules, because I didn't know you were supposed to hit the tab button beginning of every paragraph, because I didn't have anybody to teach me to do it. But once I saw how it looked, literally just how it looked, and I have this belief that it also makes the book read faster, if you're not looking that quarter inch to the right, I didn't ever do it again.

And I've had publishers lots of times say, oh, well, we need to fix your grammar. Oh, you need to put in paragraph indentations. And I'm always just like, no, I don't have to do what you tell me to do. If you want to deal with me, you got to do what I tell you to do. And it comes, I guess, truly from the 80s, from punk rock. And, you know, fuck you. I'm going to do what I want. I'm going to do it how I want.

And if you don't like it, I don't give a fuck. So I feel that both served me well in my life and caused problems for me. Yeah. So I feel that one of your failures is probably failure to behave according to other people's rules. But I wonder what it's like. I don't think that's a failure. That's a success, right? Yeah, I think you're right. Now that you're a father, because you have three kids, don't you?

How is it raising them? Are you raising them to ignore rules? No, I tell them to be true to themselves, right? There are certain rules that they need to follow. And there are plenty of rules I follow, right? Listen to your mom and dad, respect your siblings, respect your teachers, but also don't follow them blindly. You're allowed to question things. You're allowed to find your own way. I think there's some line of independence and free thought and free speech that also can exist with respecting other human beings, right? I don't ever deliberately set out to hurt anybody, but if it's something that will only hurt me, if I get in trouble for it, then that's my choice to make. So I'm not a parent myself, but one of the things I'm interested

about asking parents when I interview them for the podcast is whether they feel successful as parents or whether it's a bit like a series of failures at Ever Greater Things. I don't know. I think being a parent is an interesting and difficult and really fun and really cool thing. And I don't think as you're in it, you can say you're a success or a failure. If when my children are all 25 years old, they're reasonably well-adjusted people who can live independently and who find their own way in life, I will consider that a success. I know I tell my children constantly, like, any dream you have can come true. Anything you want to do, you can do. You don't have to do

something because you think anybody wants you to do it. If you want to be the greatest hot dog vendor in the world, great, cool, go for it. If you want to be a doctor who cures cancer, great, go for it. I talk to them about failure. I tell them constantly, like, it's okay to fail. It's okay to fall down. It's okay to not be able to do something that you learn from not being able to do something, how to do it. It came up yesterday. We're away on family vacation right now, right? And we're in a beach town and there's a surf culture here. And so I took all the kids to a surf shop and I said, well, we're going to have surfing lessons. And two of them were really stoked. And one of them was like, I don't want to, daddy. I'm not going to be able

to do it. I'm going to fall. And I'm like, that's okay. That's good, right? When you fall and you get up, you get stronger because you build confidence, knowing you can survive failure, knowing that falling down doesn't really hurt you, knowing that falling down is part of learning how to do anything, right? Whether it's literal falling down in an ocean on a surfboard or whether it's some sort of figurative falling down. Falling down is good. Yeah.

Let's talk about your new novel, Katerina, which is a story of heartbreak and loss and drugs and passion. And it's set in 1992 Paris in 2018 LA. And bits of it seem to be taken from or seem to be informed by your own life. And I wonder how you feel about doing that again. Whenever I sit down to write a book, I just try to write the best book I can, right? I don't think anymore about how people are going to react to it. I know a certain amount of copies are going to get sold. I know it's going to get a certain amount of attention, whatever it is. I had written a couple of other adult books that had nothing to do with me, at least very

literally. The characters weren't in any way based on me. And I was sitting around about a year ago, maybe a little longer, and I wanted to write a book again. And the best story I had was the one I wrote. And it was also the best story I had for the time in my life that I'm in and for how I was feeling. I don't care if people are upset because I've gone back to my own life, right? I know going in with a million little pieces, my friend Leonard, they were based on my life and published as memoirs. And all anybody wanted to do was read them and figure out what in them wasn't true. Now I'm doing the same thing and publishing it as a novel. And all anybody wants to do is read it and figure out what is true.

The point for me is that it and figure out what is true. The point for me is that it doesn't really matter either way. It's a book. For me, it's not about fact or fiction. I don't care about those rules. I don't care about those categorizations. I don't care if it upsets people that I play with those ideas that I say as a writer, I don't have to follow or do what you think I should have to do. I don't have to care about whether something is fact or fiction or whether it's something in the middle of those things. My only job is to write a book that entertains you and moves you and makes you think and makes you feel.

And at the end of it, when you close it, you're happy that you spent your time with it and your money with it. And you're happy that it exists. If I do those things, cool. I don't care about the rest of it. We know people are going to be mad that I'm doing it. And part of me likes that. I'm like, great. I hope you're mad. I hope every reader either loves the book with all their heart or hates it with all their heart that they either want to put it on a shelf and never let go of it or they want to burn it well that's the mark of

true art really isn't it you inspire a feeling it's not just inspiring someone to be uh that was okay it was mediocre didn't really make me feel yeah for me I always say if I reach that point in my career I know that I'm done right if I just write a book that people can shrug off and say, ah, it was all right, then it's time for me to stop. The artists and writers I love and admire always polarized people. And they always made people take a position on what they did. They made people either love it or hate it. And certainly, I hope to do that with every book. And it doesn't made people either love it or hate it. And certainly, I hope to do that with every book. And it doesn't bother me at all if people hate it, just like it doesn't

make me think I'm the greatest dude in the world if they love it, right? You go in just trying to live in a place where you accept whatever anybody says about it. It's so interesting talking to you now in the era of Trump and fake news when there really has been what feels like a global assault on the truth and when I look back now to see you on the Oprah Winfrey show being kind of publicly harangued for writing a million little pieces it's kind of indicative to me of a much more naive age I mean it doesn't seem that big a deal now. Yeah, it is and it isn't. I said around a million little pieces, like, I will care what people think when they hold the president of the United States to the same standard they're holding me to, right? Because

every president, at least since Reagan, was full of shit. It just so happens now Trump is way more full of shit. And again, I'll say like a politician does have a certain responsibility to the factual truth. As a writer, as a artist, if I want to be pretentious and call myself on, I don't. I don't have any real responsibility to factual truth. I have a responsibility, I say, to emotional truth. And there is a difference. I don't think I, as an artist, I don't have to live in facts, just like we were talking earlier. I don't have to follow rules, right? I don't. I don't care. We have certainly seen an assault on the truth in many ways, from our politicians, from the media, frankly, from our citizens in every way. And if anything, it's an idea that's existed for a long time, which is truth is subjective, right? I

always used to say, like, and literally use examples that are now being used quite often, that Fox News has one truth, CNN has one truth, MSNBC has one truth, right? And if you watch their coverage of a single event, you're going to see three radically different truths. And the fact is, like, truth is subjective. And a lot of it is tied to how it makes people feel. My job as a writer is just to make you feel. To use truth and or facts and or the manipulation of facts in whatever way I choose to make you feel something. I don't agree with what Donald Trump is doing. I'm no fan of Donald Trump. I think we're in big trouble in the United States right now. And I think it's okay to hold this politician to a greater standard than a writer. My only job is to write the best books I can and to make you feel.

One difference between Donald Trump and me, too, is when all that happened, I very openly said, yeah, I changed shit. I manipulated this. I altered it. My job is to make you feel, to write a great book. If you don't like that I did it, I don't really care. You joked at the beginning of our interview that you're probably the person who's failed most that I've ever spoken to. Did the whole controversy around A Million Little Pieces, did that feel like a failure? No, I don't consider that one. I consider

that a gargantuan success, which I say and people think is very odd. But when I set out to be a writer, when I moved to Paris at 21 years old, didn't speak French, didn't know anybody, didn't have a job, didn't have much money, I was chasing this dream. And the dream was to be the most controversial writer on the planet, to be a writer who wrote books that when they came out could not be ignored, that when they came out absolutely polarized opinion, that were books that were divisive and radical and unlike anything anyone had done before me. In the process of trying to do that, I worked a million little pieces, got published when I was 33 years old. I started trying at 21. So I had 12 years where I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and threw books out, wrote books, threw them out,

wrote fragments of books, threw them out. Thousands of pages of failure. When I finally started writing Million Little Pieces, I remember there was a point about 40 pages into writing it and I wrote the first 40 pages in about a day that I finished that day and I was like yeah you found it you got it and then from there I was writing the rest of the book before we sent it out I remember I sent it to a friend of mine who has a master's degree in literature from NYU and is now a professor and I remember he read it and

he was like, dude, you can't send this out. I was like, why? He's like, no grammar, no punctuation, way too violent, literally no paragraph indentations. He would like, and he said, this would get slaughtered in my workshop at NYU. And I remember he said that and I was like, get slaughtered in my workshop at NYU. And I remember he said that and I was like, yes, perfect. We sent it out. It got rejected by 17 publishers. We had people coming back like, what the fuck is this? In some ways it's great, but we can't publish this as is. And I was very sort of firm, like I won't change the grammar. I won't change how it's laid out. You take it as is or you don't take it. So we had 17 rejections. We had sent it to 18 publishers. I was sitting around like pretty depressed, like trying to figure out what to do. And we got the yes after 17 no's. The book came out. It did shockingly well right off the gate. I think it hit number four on the

New York Times bestseller list, which for an unknown writer from Los Angeles, writing a pretty brutal book about drugs and alcohol was not expected. And then a year later, the Oprah stuff happened, right? And we sold, I don't know the numbers anymore, but 5 million copies in America in three months, about 5 million more outside of America in the same period of time. And I was very uncomfortable with that because the goal had been to be the most controversial, divisive, polarizing writer on the planet. And suddenly everybody loved me. I didn't want everybody to love me. I wanted half of them to hate me. And I started seeing this therapist and I was like, dude, I don't know how this all went wrong, but it went wrong. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be beloved. The goal was to write something that was a contemporary equivalent to Baudelaire or Rimbaud or Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac or Charles Bukowski.

And now I just walk down the street and people want to like, literally people would say, could I touch you? Can you call my cousin? Can you call my brother, my mother, my father? Can you help me? You know, I had become some sort of self-help guru, which absolutely I didn't want. Then the controversies hit and it all blew up, right? I got yelled at.

I got screamed at. There were editorials and papers all over the world about how terrible I was. And while there was all that, there was also a massive groundswell of support. You know, people saying it didn't matter. This book changed my life. This book saved my life. This book made me think and understand things I never could before. And so after that second Oprah, when I just got blasted I remember the the next time I saw that therapist I sat down right he's like how you been man I was like uh it's been a weird couple of weeks he's like well you got what you wanted how's it feel and I was like yeah I don't know yet but he was right I got what I wanted and from there, it was just trying to figure out what to do next and how to live through it. But to me, it wasn't a failure at all. I got what I

wanted. I became the most controversial, most divisive, most polarizing writer on the planet. And I didn't hide from it. Do you think that part of your desire for that, I might be overstretching here, but I guess part of the desire of someone who behaves badly as an adolescent is that they want to show that they're as unlovable as they feel. Do you think there was part of you that wanted to be divisive because you didn't believe you were worth an outpouring of love and affection and people saying you really helped me? I don't know. I haven't analyzed it in that way. I always liked villains, right? I liked Baudelaire Rimbaud and Henry Miller. I liked marvelous Marvin Hagler, who was a boxer in the 80s, who was the greatest boxer of his time, but nobody liked him. They all liked Sugar Ray Leonard

because he was nice and friendly. I liked Darth Vader. I thought Darth Vader was cool, right? I would have way rather been Darth Vader than Luke Skywalker. And when it came to doing what I did, it was a lot about, I didn't want to be hated universally. I think that might be more in line with what you're talking about. I wanted to divide. And I don't think I'm not worthy of, like, I love Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. If I look at music in the 70s, would I rather have been Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten or, like, a dude in Ambrosia? I'd way rather be Sid Vicious. If you want to change the world in some way,

you better be willing to suffer for it. You better be willing to get hammered for it. You better be willing to endure through it because it won't feel good. It won't be easy. And I wanted to change the world. As I write in Katerina, I wanted to burn the world down. I wanted to write books that were undeniably their own thing, right? I understood that on some basic level. If you look at the lives of all the people I have mentioned, they've all paid for it. You just don't necessarily know going in how you will pay and how it will feel. So I don't look at a million little pieces of the failure at all,

and that's sort of indicative of my whole life. I don't look at things that other people might consider failures as failures. It's just the process, right? It's just what it is. And you can either handle it or you can't. And if you can't, get out. But I don't look at all the books I've tried to write before A Million Little Pieces that I threw away that were no good as failures. I just look at them as part of the process. You know, in my life now, I've had this company for eight years that produces books, that makes movies and television shows and video games. And literally the motto at the company is fail fast, fail often. Meaning if we take a hundred shots at doing something and we fail 99% of the time,

all that matters is that ultimately we got it right once. Who cares if we failed 99 times? It took us those 99 failures to get us to the place where we wouldn't fail. I believe in a couple different philosophies that are sort of tied together. One of them is Taoism, based on the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of philosophy by Lao Tzu. And I believe very much in Stoicism. And they both sort of say the same thing, which is if you can remove your ego from a process, that there really isn't any difference between success and failure. They're just both parts of a process. And that you shouldn't look at failure as something terrible. It just is what it is. And you shouldn't look at success as something great. It just is what it is. And so I don't care about failure at all. I can't count literally failed thousands and thousands of times in my life.

Things I tried that didn't work. Things that I thought were awesome that weren't. Who cares? I don't know if I saw how much publicly I talk about it because people don't seem to care about it. But I remember when A Million Little Pieces came out. People were like, oh, dude, you're an overnight success. It's spectacular. I'm like, I'm no fucking overnight success man

it took me 12 years to do this there were 12 years i spent sitting alone in a room where i was the only one who believed i could do it and nobody gave a fuck this was not overnight anything this was a long sustained campaign of work And all of the failures of those 12 years were what allowed me to ultimately write a book that, I mean, you can say whatever you think that book was, it sold 10 or 12 million copies, and it did everything I ever dreamed it could. Well, one of those copies was sold to me, and I do think it's an exceptional, exceptional book. I absolutely love it. Can I ask feel insecurity. Nobody doesn't lack confidence at certain points in their life. To say that I didn't would be ridiculous, right? Of course I do. There are situations I don't feel comfortable in, or I'm not a very social dude. As a writer, I'm often happiest by myself, so I often feel anxiety when I go into large social situations simply because I don't love to talk to people. But when it comes to writing a book, because I have failed so much, I don't lack.

I have almost no self-doubt. When I sit down to write a book, it's not, can you do what you want to do? Can you say what you want to say? Can you tell the story you want to tell? Can you do it in the way you want to do it? It's just how can you do what you want to do? Can you say what you want to say? Can you tell the story you want to tell? Can you do it in the way you want to do it? It's just how long will it take? I've always said that I think that's one of my great advantages over most other people who either try to write books or do write books.

I'm not scared to take risks because I've seen that taking risks can work out. I'm not scared of failing because I've seen failure as just a process you go through until you get to where you want to be. I have sold enough books at this point in my life that when I start, I know the thing's getting published and I know a certain amount of people are going to read it regardless of what it is. And in the actual writing, the minute-to-minute process of writing, every writer goes through a process of self-criticism and doubt when you write a book. But for me, it's not a big deal. It's just you'll do what you want to do.

It's just how long will it take? How many times will you have to write a single sentence until it's right? How many times will you have to write a single sentence until it's right? How many times will you have to write a single page until it's right? I know the last four adult books, the only book I've ever written that was edited was A Million Little Pieces. So like Katerina that you just read, that's the first draft of that book I wrote. And it's the only draft of it I wrote. So I wrote it. I sent it to my agent who then sent it to John Murray, our publisher in the UK. And it was, here's your book. And there's no, I don't allow people to touch it. We copy edit it to fix typos or fix missing words or fix repeated words or to

fix little things like that. But the publishers aren't allowed to edit it. They're not allowed to give me feedback. They're not allowed to give me feedback. They're not allowed to tell me to change it in any way. And I think I'm able to do that because there's a certain level of confidence that I've built up from doing this and not always doing it in great conditions, right? For all those first years, I spent most of them no money with nobody believing in me, no expectations with with nothing it was just me writing books and I'm the only one who believed that I could do it at this point I don't care what anybody has to say about it right the publisher if they don't like it they don't

have to publish it somebody else can do it and so I write one draft I send it in and that's that when you were talking earlier about how failing thousands and thousands of time is part of the process, how much was your addiction part of the process? I mean, I know not consciously, but how much do you feel looking back on it and living with it still, that it informs who you are? I mean, I think a massive amount because, you know, addiction's a thing that's hard to quantify and to say what it is and to say what it means. For me, in a way, addiction was a failure at life, right? I couldn't live in a way that allowed me to continue to live. I end up in this facility. I don't want to listen to what they're telling me

there. I will not do what they're telling me to do there. I don't believe that their course of action for me is going to work. So I just tell them all the fuck off. And yet I stayed sober anyway. So when somebody tells you, when a lot of people are telling you what you want to do can't be done and you will die if you try to do it and then you do it anyway and it works it provides you with an enormous amount of confidence and I wouldn't even say it's confidence it's something deeper than that it's just a deep sense of ability I don't know if there's a word for it a lot of times there aren't words for what we think and feel, but it certainly led

me to believe that I could do whatever I wanted to do. I was, let's say 24, a year out of rehab. I had, in my view, beaten some pretty nasty addictions to crack and booze. And I did it my own way. I didn't go to AA. I didn't see a therapist. I didn't do any of this shit. I was told I was bad to do, but I did it anyway. And so at that point in my life, I was like, yeah, I did that. Nothing else is going to be that big a deal. Nobody can hurt me the way I've already hurt myself. Nobody can insult me. Nobody can break my heart worse than I've already done to myself. Like writing a book, that's no sweat, right? I mean, I think at that point in my life, if I had wanted to have been a doctor, I could have been a doctor. If I wanted to be a hedge fund manager, I believe I had the confidence

to do almost anything I wanted to because the experience of going through rehab and surviving those addictions had provided me with that confidence. Does that make sense? It makes total sense. And also part of the reason you are an anomaly is because you didn't follow the 12-step program, because you didn't believe in God, which you have to, to follow that program. But you talk very movingly in Katerina. Your protagonist talks quite movingly about his struggles with faith and almost a desire to believe in God, but knowing that you don't. Where are you on that particular journey?

You know, I wrote a book about God, the final testament of the Holy Bible. The cover of a million little pieces, at least in America, is that hand, right? And that hand is lifted from the Sistine Chapel. It's in the precise position of Adam trying to touch the hand of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And because that book is really about somebody who's trying to touch God, right? Trying to find some divinity, some purity that will get him through the day. I mean, there are days when I deeply believe in God and there are days when I don't. And I think that's okay. And if there is a

God, I think God is probably cool with that, right? I don't know strength or faith or belief or joy in different things at different times. Sometimes it's my wife and kids. Sometimes it's my work. Sometimes it's friends. Sometimes it's a book. Sometimes it's a song. Sometimes it's going to a church and sitting in there and talking to God, knowing that I don't know if I'm talking to anybody or not. I do know a lot of times when I'm stressed out, I will go to a church and just sit there. Just sit there in the quiet and stare at the stained glass windows

or the cross or the altar or stare at the floor. But that just sometimes being in a big, empty building where people worship God makes me feel better. It somehow relieves anxiety that I feel. I don't ever pretend to have answers to any of life's great questions, and I don't think you have to have answers to life's great questions. I think it's cool to not know. And I don't know. I know how I was able to

overcome drugs. And that that only worked for me, I'm not going to say that it'll work for other people that other people should go the way I go. And I'm not going to judge them for however they did it. Like, the only thing that matters is did you survive it? And for me, like the journey of faith, if you want to call it that, however you want to do it is cool. For me, it's how will I feel when the lights go out in that moment before I die? Will I be cool with how I've lived? Will I be cool with what I've done and how I've made people feel? And will I be okay with it at the end of it?

And sometimes God plays a big part in thinking about that. Sometimes not. Talking of sort of judgment, one of my favorite stories about you is that after you were brought back onto the Oprah Winfrey show for your kind of humiliation and repentance, you commissioned a work of art from Ed Ruscha

and it's called Public Stoning. And it has those words on the piece of art and you now own it and I wonder how much you feel years have passed since your own public humiliation but today it feels that we live in an age of constant social media where everyone has opinions about everyone else on Twitter and various other forum. And I just wondered if you felt that there was an innate human need for us to judge others. Yeah, I think most people are judgmental, right? I think it makes you feel better about whatever you think

or whatever you believe to judge other people. It reinforces your own value system. I think it's funny you call it a humiliation, right? Almost as I said that word, I was like, I think that's the wrong word to use. I always say like, people are like, oh, how was that? It must've been so awful. I was like, man, it was an hour and 10 minutes long. Some TV talk show host yelled at me. I don't give a fuck. There've been so many worse things that have happened in my life than that. Who cares? Somebody yelled at me. Wasn't the first time it happened and it wasn't the last. And I don't give

a fuck. If anything, it spread the book to millions and millions and millions of more people who had the chance to read it and decide for themselves how they felt about it. Yeah, I think people judge other people because it's easy to do, because it makes them feel better, because it reinforces their own value systems. I think it's pretty hard not to be judgmental, right? That we're naturally inclined to judge others. I just find it a simpler, better, more peaceful way to live to not. I'm not trying to be a jerk when I say this, but I don't care what your religious beliefs are. I don't care how you live. I don't care what kind of clothes you wear, what kind of music you listen to, or what kind of books

you read, as long as you're cool with them. One thing I will say about God and the Bible and a lot of these great religious books is they do have very valid messages. In the Gospels of Christ, he says there are two laws that man must follow. The first is believe in God, and the second is love thy neighbor as you love thyself. And I think that's a beautiful thing. And I think it's okay for people to live however they want to live and believe in whatever they want to believe and do whatever they want to do as long as they're not hurting other people deliberately in the process that's the real rule don't fuck with other people i don't give a shit about what you think or believe or how

you live not because i'm judgmental it's because you as a human being have the right to make your own choices and i don't believe it's my place to judge them i don't like trump i think he's a fucking idiot and he's a bad, you know, the worst president we've ever had doing terrible things to the country and for the future of the country. But there are a lot of people who love him. So be it. We'll see what happens. So if Oprah Winfrey were to stand as president, would you vote for her? I mean, I guess it would depend on who she's running against. Listen, I have no beef with Oprah. I have no bad feelings towards Oprah.

She's an extraordinary woman who has achieved extraordinary things in life and deserves all the adulation and respect she gets. If she ran for president, I would do what I have always done, which is like, all right, listen to what she has to say and decide if you agree with it. She's certainly brilliant and accomplished. She has certainly run massive organizations in very efficient and productive ways. You know, she'd probably be a really good president. Before we go, I want you to tell me one practical thing that you're not good at. Like, are you not good at mowing the lawn? Are you not good at cooking? What's one thing that you're not good at? Like, are you not good at mowing the lawn? Are you not good at cooking? What's one thing that you fail at on a very mundane basis? Yeah, I'm not a good

cook, man. My wife and children don't even let me near the kitchen. Like, I can go buy the food. I can go pick it up. I can put it in the fridge. If I try to cook, they're just like, go away, man. We're not eating it. Sometimes I still do it anyway, just to fuck around. Because you're breaking the rules. No, just to amuse everybody. But, and I cook simple things that are almost impossible to fuck up. Like my kids love chicken Parmesan, right? I wouldn't dare try to do that, but I can cook a cheeseburger. Any fool can cook a cheeseburger. There are a lot of things I'm not good at. I'm probably good at many fewer things than I'm not good at. I'm good at sitting alone in a room and stringing words along on a page to make people feel something. Plenty of things that I'm not good at, and that's okay. This sort of gets back to what I was saying

about how I write first drafts and that's it. I think imperfections and flaws are part of the beauty of life, right? I often compare the books I write to the paintings people make. And if you go look at the Sistine Chapel or you go look at any painting, there are always going to be imperfections and flaws in it. And painters don't have the opportunity that writers do to go back and try to fix it over and over again. I love those flaws. So part of my philosophy with writing one draft of a book is, yeah, it's going to have flaws. It's going to have imperfections. It's going to have shit in it that doesn't work, that fails. But that's cool because that's life, right? And just like my books have flaws and imperfections and things that don't work in them,

so certainly so do I as a human being. And that's okay. It's just part of it. And I accept it and I love it as much as I love whatever I'm good at. Well, ultimately, imperfection is truth and truth is beauty. Speaking personally, I'm very, very glad that one of the things that you are good at is sitting alone in a room stringing sentences together. Thank you.

Yeah, you're a terrific writer and it's been such a pleasure speaking to you today. Thank you for being so open and insightful and all while chewing Nicorette gum. All while chewing Nicorette. That's one of my flaws. I chew Nicorette from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I go to bed at night. I'm deeply addicted to end on. It's not insurmountable. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you reading my books. I appreciate you having me on your show. And I hope I get to meet you when I'm in the UK. Thank you for having me. Have a great day. You too. thank you for having me have a great day for whatever it's worth to all your uk uh and english listeners i deeply deeply was rooting for england to win the world cup this year that means a lot

to us thank you they're such a decent team ah they were so easy to root for but an example of they failed but i bet you in the next tournament, they learn from that failure. They're going to be really, really good next time. Yeah, I totally agree. And I also think that the way they dealt with defeat was noble. The whole thing was great. It was the greatest story of the World Cup, right? It was the most fun.

It was the most inspiring, the most unexpected. Nobody expected them to do that. And that was part of the beauty of it they failed but they won anyway they did