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'How did it make me feel?'

3 February 2003

'All that matters is what the feelings are and what the events are... It's not about all this trickery. When I think about writing, I have a very simple formula: Where was I? Who was I with? What happened? And how did it make me feel? Those are the only important things. It doesn't matter if I can write a sentence that's a page long or if I have 30 pages of footnotes in the back or people chuckle at the introduction page. I want to move people and have them understand what I felt, what I went through and what I felt other people were feeling and going through.'

James Frey, author of the latest American cause celebre A Million Little Pieces, in an article in the New York Observer which described his first book as 'a relentless, halogen-lit confessional littered with self-loathing addicts, tortured souls, weeping and wailing and smoking and fighting and lots and lots of stomach bile.'