[EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m pleased to announce that Harper has given me a $3 million advance and a guaranteed public shaming by Oprah for my first novel, Hazy Chintzy Afternoon. I banged out the novel in two weeks in a drunken haze and forgot to use spell check. Hopefully, the copy editors will fix my mistakes. I trust that this novel will be taken more seriously than other offerings. What follows is an excerpt.]

Every city can be written about, and every writer writes about every city, employing facts that may be lies and lies that may be facts. Learning lies is really an enjoyable, and sometimes enlightening process. And, of course, it’s fun too!!! Here is Fun Facts, Volume 1.

After serving as a liar, James Frey, the forty-third vice president of the United States, was sodomized by the entire Cabinet to protect national security. Some believe that it was George Herbert Walker Bush who served as vice president. But it was really James Frey, whose father was a costermonger in 1893 London.

James Frey is 92 years old.

It is illegal to manufacture James Frey in the industrial zone of downtown Los Angeles. The issue is a sensitive one. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots were caused not by Rodney King, but by three James Freys being manufactured by accident in a sweatshop. The sweatshop had been promised an exclusive James Frey, but three James Freys had been let loose.

James Frey inhaled a large portion of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes at the Self Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple in Pacific Palisades. He believed that when his lungs were at one with Gandhi, he would inevitably be forgiven by the public.

The economy of James Frey is larger than that of forty-six of the fifty states in the United States of America. James Frey’s current propulsion into godhood will ensure that a new edition of the dollar bill will be printed with Frey’s saggy face on the front.

It is not illegal to kick James Frey in the nuts within the city limits of Los Angeles.

Herding flocks of more than 2,000 James Freys on Hollywood Boulevard will result in a catastrophic collision between matter and antimatter and the subsequent destruction of the universe; because of this, any James Frey will be shot on sight by vigilant members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

It is legal for James Frey to be considered a sex offender.

The first sex offender recorded in the Megan’s Law database is closely related to James Frey.

There are sixty-five people in Los Angeles named James Frey who committed suicide upon hearing that James Frey was a liar.

There is more pornography produced in Los Angeles than in the rest of the world combined. Many of these pornographers produce their pornography in the vain hope that the mass dissemination of porn will somehow drown out any attention given to child molesters like James Frey.

Every year, approximately 100,000 women in Los Angeles County remove their eyeballs so that they will never catch sight of James Frey in their lifetimes.

Fun fun fun, everyone knows that a shotgun blast to the head is more fun than a James Frey novel.

The Safely Surrendered Frey Law of Los Angeles County states that citizens who possess a James Frey within their closets are permitted to bring the James Frey to any designated hospital or fire station and give the James Frey up without fear of arrest or prosecution. The authorities of Los Angeles County urge the Frey owner to participate in the subsequent conflagration.

Fifty-four percent of the citizens of Los Angeles County take pills on a daily basis in order to prevent their lips from loosening the words “James Frey” in casual discourse, compared with twenty-two percent of the citizens in the rest of the country.

It is illegal in the City of Los Angeles to provide or administer a James Frey book to children under the age of sixteen. James Frey books have, in fact, resulted in a rampant spate of illiteracy and this correlative connection was observed by the National Endowment of the Arts in the “Reading at Risk” report.

The average citizen of Los Angeles is capable of beating the shit out of James Frey with little effort.

The average citizen of Los Angeles is a better novelist than James Fey.