When Oprah Winfrey delivered her nationally televised spanking of disgraced pseudo-memorist James Frey back in January 2006, Maureen Dowd hailed it as a triumph: "It was a huge relief," she opined, "after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W's delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying and conning -- and embarrassing her."

Now, multiple media reports indicate that Frey may have been much busier than an Amazon.com search makes it seem over these last couple of years. He has almost certainly been co-authoring a six-part sci-fi series I Am Number Four under the pseudonym "Pittacus Lore" and could have as many as nine different projects going under different noms de plume.

And he's overtaken Stephen King and Michael Chabon as the real-life figure behind the mysterious "John Twelve Hawks," author of the dystopian Fourth Realm Trilogy.

Doubleday insists it has never met the man known variously as Twelve Hawks, J12H and JXIIH; he communicates only via Internet, fax, and untraceable phones (with the use of a voice-scrambler, no less), and deploys a stand-in for rare interviews. Or at least, this is their story.

Proving that he at least still has a flair for self-promotion, Frey told the New York Post: "I will neither confirm nor deny that I am John Twelve Hawks, Pittacus Lore, or anyone else...I will said I have done, and am continuing to do, projects that will come out anonymously or with invented names on them."

Good for him. Really.

Frey lied in A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard. He presented as fact what was substantively fiction. Sadly,  the way we separate out -- and more importantly, the way modern publishing markets -- fiction and nonfiction books left him little choice.  

Addiction-recovery stories need a face. As fiction, it's the not-all-that-inventive, vomit-and-piss soaked, obscenity-laden story of an unlikable middle-class kid turned crack-addict, and it's headed for the remainder bin. As memoir, with the author sitting in front of you, saying "I lived through this, I survived it, and I thrived," it becomes a triumph of the human spirit, and it spends a good portion of a year on the New York Times Bestsellers' List.   

As The Smoking Gun noted in it's now infamous take-down of Frey back in 2005, Frey had first tried to sell A Million Little Pieces as a work of fiction, only to be rejected by 17 different publishers. When Nan Talese signed the book, believing it to be a moderately embellished autobiography, she "declined to publish it as (fiction)." Frey, handed a $50,000 advance and a multi-book deal after years of effort, happily went along with it.

How could he do that?

Well, writers write. Writers want to be published. Writers want to eat the occasional meal. Writers sometimes want to be famous. Only a very few of us erstwhile scribblers will ever even have the glimmer of the hope of the chance to get out work to a publisher who might want to turn our scribbles into a proper book. Frey understood that.  

This is not to say he's some sort of victim, here -- just a gambler who tossed the dice and lost big. He deserved to be be called out for publicly portraying his work as fact.

But he took his punishment, he wore his hair-shirt, he vanished from the scene. Is he also supposed to spend the rest of his life working at fast-food joints?

Hell, even Oprah eventually apologized for being mean to him.

Life has not been kind to Frey since the Great Oprah-atic Spanking. In 2008, he lost his 11-day old son to a rare genetic disorder. "The last three years have been surreal and difficult and at times uncomfortable and at times terrible," he told Time last spring. "But at this point, I'm cool with all of it, at peace with all of it. The priorities now are taking care of my family and producing the best work  of my life."

Still, the fall from grace must burn. Asked to contribute a six-word memoir for a new anthology called It All Changed In An Instant, Frey came up with this: