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Is James Frey really today’s Gawker intern?

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The photographic evidence is clear -- well, actually, it’s cameraphone-blurry, but there it is. At right, James Frey, holding a box of donuts for a genuine Gawker staffer. Quite possibly Sheila McClear -- at least, she’s the one who has posted about the circumstances that led to Frey’s, er, internment at the Gawker office.

A while ago, in an attempt to get Ryan Adams as my intern instead of him interning at Blackbook (nice catch, Mohney!), I received a one-line e-mail from somebody calling himself James Frey. ‘I’ll come intern for a day,’ it read.

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In addition to Frey’s duties as donut-wrangler, Sheila writes that he’ll be ‘be helping me pack my things into boxes for my imminent departure,’ which is kind of sad. She scored a literary celebrity intern -- they ought to keep her around. Frey has another duty, as well, she writes: fact-checking.

Kidding, right?

Frey’s ‘Million Little Pieces,’ which recounted his debauchery and recovery, was an Oprah pick, making him pretty famous; when ‘key details of the book were exposed as made up,’ he got even more famous.

Frey has since moved on to pure fiction; ‘Bright Shiny Morning,’ a novel set in Los Angeles, was published in May.

Photos can be faked, of course. Anything can be faked these days.

But if it really is Frey, and if he’s in the market for interning, he’s invited to intern for Jacket Copy. We won’t make him get donuts or fact-check; he can do something really cool, like catch up on our RSS feeds.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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