Author James Frey listens at a book signing in New York May 14, for his novel Bright Shiny Morning. (Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press)

U.S. author James Frey is defiant in the face of his tarnished reputation.

The man who was slapped down by Oprah Winfrey after it was discovered his "memoir" of recovery from drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces, contained as much fiction as fact, says he's not going to be bound by some "literati's" rules over what is fiction and what non-fiction.

"There is no line any more between fact and fiction," he said, paraphrasing Norman Mailer.

Nor did he ever consider ducking out of the limelight and abandoning his career as a writer.

"I had a bad couple months at work a couple of years ago and after it was over I did what I do. I went back to work," he said in an interview Tuesday with the CBC cultural affairs show, Q.

"I think it was a much bigger deal in the media than it was with the average person who walks down the street."

What he did was continue writing a novel, Bright Shiny Morning, which came out in May and is now No. 12 on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Frey told Q he has big ambitions. He wants to be another Mailer, another Ernest Hemingway, with the ego to match.

He compares his novel, which tells the story of Los Angeles, with the work of Victor Hugo, who recreated Paris in his books, or Charles Dickens, who gave us London.

Bright Shiny Morning is a huge, complex epic with multiple characters trying to make it in Los Angeles.

"L.A. is a city of massive immigration, foreign immigration and internal immigration," Frey said. "It's a place where people go for a better life. It's sort the embodiment of the American dream, whatever those dreams may be."

In Bright Shiny Morning, Frey continues to play fast and loose with the past, so much so that a Los Angeles historian has called him on it.

Frey relates snippets from L.A. history in the book, but freely admits that where he couldn't find a fact, or a story that backed up his fictional treatment, he created a "factoid."

Shouldn't the author who was castigated across America for creating fiction and calling it a memoir be more careful with the truth and his own fragile reputation?

"You could call it a wink, you could call it a middle finger," Frey said. "It was a defiant acknowledgement of [what happened]."

"Part of the idea is to play with the idea of what I can do and what I can't do and what the rules are and whose job it is to even uphold them and why I should even bother with them. I'm the writer and this is my work of art," he added.

"I think readers connect with what I write because I tell universal stories about universal feelings."

Frey says of the 4.5 million people who bought A Million Little Pieces, only 1,700 actually asked for their money back under a deal offered by his publisher.

Lawsuits over the memoir, including some in Canada, are still pending.

The subject of his next book — a 32-year-old secular Jew who believes he is the Messiah — is equally tricky territory.

"It's sort of my statement on religion and how I think religion has been distorted over time and is still distorted in nasty ways in America," Frey said.