James Frey's Blog
September 1, 2025
The Uncancellation Era
What does life look like after cancellation? James Frey and Lee Tilghman on public shame, letting go, and leaning into being outsiders.
By Suzy Weiss
GETTING CANCELED “CAN ALSO BE FREEING,” WRITES SUZY WEISS. “IT IMMUNIZES YOU TO SHAME.” (ILLUSTRATION BY THE FREE PRESS, IMAGES VIA GETTY AND @LEEFROMAMERICA)was an early casualty of cancel culture. It was 2013. I was 17, and I had written a story for The Wall Street Journal about getting rejected from college that went viral. I bemoaned not having “killer SAT scores” and “two moms,” and the whole thing was a joke. Except, it attracted millions of reactions, most of them bad, that were chronicled all over the internet, but mostly on a website that I’d never visited before called Twitter. “I wish I could meet Suzy Lee Weiss so I could punch that whiny bitch in the face” is a representative tweet about me from around this time.
Overwhelmed, though deeply grateful my braces had already come off, I went on the Today show to clear my name, and hoped that after I did, I would never have to talk about the ordeal again. Reader, I’ve been talking about it for over a decade. But I’ll save the whole story for another day.
Getting canceled like this, a thoroughly modern phenomenon, is something we’ve written about many times here at The Free Press, and for good reason. Cancel culture ruins individual lives, but it also puts all of us on tenterhooks. By making an example of one person, it sends a message to everyone else: “Stay in line, or you’ll be next.”
August 27, 2025
August 26, 2025
The A24 Project
The studio is brilliant at selling small, provocative films. Now it wants to sell blockbusters, too.
By Alex Barasch
dddIn November of 2015, the upstart film studio A24 had a problem. Executives had acquired the writer-director Robert Eggers’s stark, unsettling début, “The Witch,” at the Sundance Film Festival and wanted to make it their first release to open on thousands of screens. But both Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred as a teen-ager tempted by unholy forces, were then unknown. The story, set in the sixteen-thirties and scripted in Early Modern English, was a tough sell. To generate buzz, the company sought an unlikely partner: the Satanic Temple.
August 25, 2025
People Are Awesome
Kevin Berthia unexpectedly helped save Kevin Briggs’ life. Now the pair, “more like brothers” than friends, are looking back on the day that changed them both
By Johnny Dodd
Kevin Briggs talks with Kevin Berthia (in white) at the Golden Gate Bridge in March 2005. John Storey / San Francisco Chronicle / PolarisOn the worst morning of his life, Kevin Berthia awoke and, after years of fighting with depression, decided that he was going to drive to the Golden Gate Bridge and jump.
Berthia, who was 22 years old at the time and living in Oakland, Calif., had never been to the famed landmark before and had to repeatedly ask for directions along the way.
But minutes after parking in a lot at the north end of the bridge on March 11, 2005, he left his keys in the ignition and took off walking along the 1.7-mile expanse, glancing down at the San Francisco Bay, telling himself, “The water is my freedom. I’m ready.”
Before long, the young man who had just lost his job and was overwhelmed by medical bills after the recent premature birth of his daughter scrambled over the railing and soon found himself balancing on a tiny metal conduit that ran along the outside of the bridge.
The frigid water of the bay churned 220 feet below him.
“I started my countdown,” Berthia recalls now. “And I braced myself for impact.”
Then something unexpected happened. Two decades later, Berthia still refers to it as “a miracle.”
August 24, 2025
Honey Deuce
The US Open’s famous cocktail brings in more than $12 million. But its success, and that of its counterparts, is measured in more than sales.
Susan Czeterko Jordan has a shrine to a cocktail. In her apartment, a delicate watercolor print of the Honey Deuce, the signature drink of the US Open, hangs above a cabinet stuffed with commemorative plastic cups. She amassed the collection throughout more than a decade of attending the New York City tennis tournament, each time making a beeline for the blush-pink beverage.
“It’s refreshing, and it’s a status symbol,” she says. “Sometimes they even run out of cups by the end of the night.” When she got married, the number-one item on her registry was a melon baller so she could replicate the cocktail’s signature garnish: a trio of honeydew melon “tennis ball” spheres.
August 23, 2025
Saving The Canals
The Venice Canals have been rocked by a spate of dog illnesses and deaths this summer
By Paula Mejía, Contributing LA Culture Editor
Not long after Ramón J. Goñi moved to Los Angeles seven years ago, he went on a date. The pair strolled around the serene Venice Canals, a small Westside enclave with homes separated by shallow waterways. “What is this place?” Goñi remembers thinking. “And also, how many millions of dollars do you need to make to live in this place?” The area’s natural beauty stuck with Goñi, who originally hails from Madrid. “I was really attracted to that, but I thought it was never going to be possible to live here.”
But when the pandemic surged through Southern California a few years ago, rents dropped all across Los Angeles County. Suddenly, Goñi had some wiggle room to negotiate on monthly rental rates, and he nabbed a one-bedroom apartment in the back of a house along one of the canals. He soon realized he was far from the only renter in this idyllic slice of Venice, with homes that sell for $1.8 million on average, and found himself more connected to his neighbors given their proximity to one another in the car-free canals. “It’s really hard to be a complete isolationist living here,” he says. “The connections are going to happen, whether you want it or not.”
August 21, 2025
“James Frey Likes Smart People” – Dan
The Authors Night 2025 crowd / Lisa TamburiniGeorge Hamilton is a groupie. Maureen Dowd is in here somewhere. James Frey likes smart people. Dr. Ruth is still alive, in a way. And Christie Brinkley wants Bobbi Brown’s book. Hold on, the Uptown Girl is posing for a selfie. Okay she’s back. The age-defying super model joined a record crowd for Authors Night in East Hampton’s Herrick Park Saturday.
Hold on, she’s posing again. Hey, she’s good at it.
I’m back mopping my brow and snaking through the crowd of A-List authors and their fans to benefit the East Hampton Library. “Maureen Dowd is here!” gushes Jill Brooke. The former CNN anchor has a website called FlowerPowerDaily so she’s looking for gardening tomes. “It’s like catnip. You discover books you may not have known about and meet the authors.”
August 20, 2025
AIwood
An early winner in the generative AI wars was near collapse—then bet everything on a star-studded comeback. Can Stability AI beat the competition?
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: MARK HARRIS; GETTY IMAGESLADY GAGA PROBABLY wasn’t thinking that a coup would unfold in her greenhouse. Then again, she was cohosting a party there with Sean Parker, the billionaire founder of Napster and first president of Facebook.
It was February 2024, and the singer had invited guests to her $22.5 million oceanside estate in Malibu to mark the launch of a skin-care nonprofit. One of the organization’s trustees was her boyfriend, whose day job was running the Parker Foundation. In the candlelit space, beside floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Pacific, Parker’s people mingled with Gaga’s, nibbling focaccia and branzino alla brace to music from a string quartet (Grammy-winning, of course).
August 19, 2025
Authors Night Hamptons 2025
As the founder of BookTrib (and a book publicist with three decades of experience in the literary world), I’ve attended my fair share of fantastic book events. But there’s something undeniably special about the star-studded East Hampton Authors Night…
Christie Brinkley, whose new memoir Uptown Girl tells the story of her meteoric rise to fame, flashed her million-dollar smile.
Griffin Dunne, author of The Friday Afternoon Club (a perfect self-narrated audiobook listen that gives readers an inside look at the Los Angeles literary scene; highly recommend!), charmed the crowd with his Hollywood good looks and warm smile.
James Frey made a splash with his latest novel Next to Heaven, a dark thriller about a wealthy Connecticut town that sounds astonishingly similar to BookTrib HQ’s hometown of Westport, CT. (Come visit, James! We have questions!)
August 16, 2025
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