Living as we do in confessional times, there is little that gets the publishing juices going as effectively as a brutally honest rehab memoir. The more guts that are spilled, the more we can slide inside the protagonist’s mind and experience his pain without, of course, experiencing it at all. It’s prurient, but that’s what we do these days, and if we need an excuse we call it empathy.

As the most compelling contemporary exponent of this genre, James Frey is remarkable for his refusal to make excuses for his addiction to cocaine, crack, alcohol and just about any other substance you care to name. In charting his journey from rock bottom to redemption in the best-selling A Million Little Pieces, he seeks neither causes nor to apportion blame for his self-destruction. It was honest, he maintained when the book came out, and those of us who read it marvelled at the power and brutality of his writing, at his anger, and at his uncompromising self-loathing.

Or most of us did. Some of those who know something of the dark places Frey has experienced doubted the story, but it was not until last year that William Bastone, editor of thesmokinggun.com website, thought to check the events described, and found scant evidence to support some of them.

Frey countered that his first book was “a subjective truth,” an impressionistic treatment of his decade of self-abuse, but his agent dropped him and his publishers offered refunds. And again Frey has been redeemed: his next book, a novel called Bright Shiny Morning, is to be published by HarperCollins.

Oddly, although he has bared his soul to his readers, we don’t know a great deal about the facts of his life. I’ve interviewed him and I don’t know much more: in 2005 he was twitchy, uncomfortable and seemed bored by his success. “All my dreams have come true. What do I do now?” he asked. What we do know is that he grew up in Ohio and Michigan, observing rock heroes and wanting to be a wild man, and that his parents were wealthy, self-made and largely absent. By the age of ten he was drinking alcohol, by his teens he was an addict and a criminal, by 23 he was in rehab.

Willpower pulled him out of the mess – he rejected the 12-step programme and insists that addiction is not a disease – and just as his stubbornness had kept him an addict, so it has kept him clean. He became a screenwriter, wrote A Million Little Pieces and initially presented it as a novel, before succumbing to the thirst for memoirs. At 38, he is married to an advertising executive, has a daughter and lives in New York City but doesn’t engage with the stellar culture. If he has a problem it is that he isn’t the big bruising macho character of his memoirs (My Friend Leonardwas published in 2005); he is a great writer, no more, no less.

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