James Frey (born 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American writer and author; formerly a self-described alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal. Frey spent most of childhood in Ohio and Michigan. He graduated from high school in 1988, and attended college at Denison University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1993, Frey committed himself (with the support of his family) to the Hazelden rehabilitation center in Minnesota for treatment of drug addiction and alcoholism; he stayed two months and has remained sober ever since. Frey moved to Chicago in 1994, where he worked as a doorman, stock boy, and janitor. In 1996, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a screenwriter, director and producer. Frey now lives in New York with his wife Maya, daughter Maren, and their two dogs.

Frey started writing A Million Little Pieces in the spring of 1996. He took a second mortgage on his house and saved enough money so he would not have to work for twelve months while he focused on completing the rest of his memoir. A Million Little Pieces was published in May of 2003 and became a bestseller. In 2004, Frey wrote My Friend Leonard, which continues where A Million Little Pieces left off and centers around the father-son relationship Frey and his friend from Hazelden, mobster Leonard, shared. In June of 2005, My Friend Leonard became a bestseller. In September 2005, Oprah Winfrey chose A Million Little Pieces for her monthly bookclub. Oprah Winfrey took on Frey, accusing him on live television of lying about A Million Little Pieces and letting down the many fans of his memoir of addiction and recovery. "I feel duped,'' she said Thursday on her syndicated talk show. "But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.''

Frey, who found himself booed in the same Chicago studio where he had been embraced not long ago, acknowledged that he had lied.A sometimes angry, sometimes tearful Winfrey asked Frey why he "felt the need to lie.'' Audience members often groaned and gasped at Frey's halting, stuttered admissions that certain facts and characters had been "altered'' but that the essence of his memoir was real. "I don't think it is a novel,'' Frey said of his book, which had initially been offered to publishers, and rejected by many, as fiction. "I still think it's a memoir.''