Saturday, March 13, 2010

Book 10: "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey

My next entry in The Big Book Read 2010 is James Frey's controversial memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." A friend and colleague lent it, and I carried it around in my car for a while until the day I had multiple medical appointments, and snatched it up to avoid having to choose between Sports Illustrated and Parenting magazines in the waiting rooms.
The book was published in 2003, and is Frey's 400+ page recounting of the period in his life when, at age 23, in 1992, his addictions were close to killing him, and how he was pushed into rehab where he met a cast of colorful characters and managed to get his act together. He writes in a stream of consciousness style, lots of dialogue but no quotation marks, repetition of key words and phrases, and plenty of strong emotions and language.

The controversy surrounding the book, which I had heard about at the time it was published but had basically forgotten, was that it was not a true memoir; Frey played fast and loose with the truth, and this eventually came to light. He addresses this issue in an introductory "Note to the Reader" at the beginning of this paperback edition which came out a couple of years later. He says that he believes that memoir "is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection" rather than a work that adheres to "a strict journalistic or historical standard," and that this book is a "combination of facts about my life and certain embellishments," a "subjective truth." He owns up to, and apologizes for, a certain number of "embellishments" for purposes of dramatic tension, of respecting others' privacy/anonymity, "to serve what I felt was the greater purpose of the book."

Whatever.

Having read this confession, as well as the Publisher's apology that follows Frey's, I simply read the book. I tried to read it without making any distinction between fiction and non- and, despite mentally remarking a few times, "Oh, reeaaallly," it made no difference in the end to me whether it was all based on reality. It was a moderately interesting book that delivered what it purported to be about: a young guy navigating the rocky road of rehabilitation.

His rather raw writing style meshes well with the content. The setting and the people are not pretty. He does emphasize the egalitarian nature of addiction in his portrayels of a population at the rehab facility that includes folks from every walk of life, high and low. They are all brought low by their obsessions and compulsions. Frey refers to some of them as "good men who happen to be bad men."

The figures that he cites are alarming -- less than 15 per cent of addicts will get sober and stay sober. Many, many of them will die far too young of their addictions, and their deaths will be violent and dirty and scarey. James Frey was almost one of them. The story he writes is bleak, graphic, and full of anger and fear. There is also hope.

This is not a book I would necessarily recommend to someone struggling with their own addictions and seeking a way out of the woods. Frey strenuously rejects the standard treatment and recovery options, carving his own way out -- one important discovery for him is the truth he finds in a little book his brother gives him, the "Tao te Ching" -- but he apparently does succeed. He was still sober in 2006, thirteen years after publication of his "memoir," regardless of the ultimate veracity of it.

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