After James Frey's bodyguards escorted him on stage Tuesday night for a Bright Shiny Morning reading, the author sat down with CNN's Lola Ogunnaike, who asked him difficult questions like, "You could've easily written a memoir, a post-scandal memoir, but instead you chose to write a novel. Why?"

Um, because "nobody would believe me."

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The take away from this Page Six item about James Frey reading from Bright Shiny Morning at the Blender Theater two nights ago: The author now travels "flanked by two huge body-builders." [P6]

James Frey's new book Bright Shiny Morning, which hits this week, is the much-talked-about follow-up to A Million Little Pieces, a book that got him in all sorts of trouble with Oprah, the book-reading public, and the publishing industry.

Originally, Frey touted Pieces, in the press, as a memoir, though he was soon exposed as a fraud.

Then Jossip heard some rumors that began creeping out of Doubleday, the publisher of Pieces, and were finally solidified in Vanity Fair, where reporter Evgenia Peretz, in a mostly friendly article, reported that on an internal "author’s questionnaire", Frey had originally wrote, months prior to the book's release, "I think of this book more a work of art or literature than I do a work of memoir or autobiography."

A novel, then. And that's been Frey's excuse since being exposed: He never intended the book to be labeled a memoir, but was taken down that path by the marketing department. Subsequent copies of Pieces have thus carried a disclaimer.

Funny, then, that Frey's Morning, from publisher Harper, went to press with this printed on the inside cover flap of the dust jacket, effectively making it the first sentence the book's readers will see:

"One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel — a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original."

Ahem. His first novel?