Fancying himself more like Hirst and Murakami than Proust, controversial memoirist James Frey is all over the Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine today with stories about his literary factory. Here’s a quote from New York Magazine on the author’s affinity for painters and painting:

Frey said he never considered whether A Million Little Pieces was fiction or nonfiction—and anyway, before the memoir craze of the nineties, it would have been published as a novel. “If Picasso painted a Cubist self-portrait,” he suggested, “nobody would say it didn’t look like him.” Much of his performance for us echoed comments he’d made to journalists. “My best friends are almost all artists,” he told a Canadian reporter earlier this year. “I have very few friends who are writers … I’m a big fan of breaking the rules, creating new forms, moving on to new places. Contemporary artists like [Richard] Prince, Hirst, and Koons do that, but there are no literary equivalents. In literature, you don’t see many radical books. That’s what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions. I’ve already been cast out of ‘proper’ American literary circles. I don’t have to be a good boy anymore. I find that the older I get, the more radical my work becomes.”

James Frey’s Fiction Factory (New York Magazine)