A Million Little Pieces
by James Frey
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Book Summary Information
Author: James FreyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-22
ISBN: 0307276902
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Anchor
Product features:
- Condition: Used - Good
Book Reviews of A Million Little Pieces
Book Review: Fascinating, Compelling and Wrong
Summary: 5 Stars
I can't objectively review this book.
As a writer and reader, I found it an interesting story, written in a clear and original voice; it is a stark tale of a harrowing ordeal that culminates in a gut-wrenching ending. As a recovering alcoholic--albeit one with only one paltry year of sobriety--I found it wrong-headed and misguided, a book that might entertain more people than it enriches, a colossal monument hand-built by the author to commemorate his own pride and stubborn self-will.
James Frey found himself scraping rock bottom at the ripe young age of 23. Years of Jack Daniels drinkin' and crack smokin' had left him broken in body, mind and soul. Having alienated friends and family, and with no other alternatives but prison or death, he finds himself in rehab at an unnamed clinic in the wilds of Minnesota. (Hazelden, according to those in the know.)
"A Million Little Pieces" chronicles the six weeks he spent there in blistering, mesmerizing prose shorn of ornament and flourish, shorn, even, of all indentation and most punctuation. An unconventional style, it is nonetheless truly distinctive and perfectly suited to the fevered rhythms of the addiction-addled brain.
From the first paragraph, when Frey describes the "colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood" on his clothes, it's clear that he's out to write a relentless book about an ugly topic; on subsequent pages, he pummels the reader with powerful descriptions of his chemical cravings, their dire physical consequences, and their root cause, a white-hot anger he refers to as "The Fury."
In discussing his endless wants and desires, Frey shows some great and true and original insights into the mind of the addict. "More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to be close to someone. More than anything, all I have ever wanted is to feel as if I wasn't alone," he says early in the book, in one of the most succinct and profound statements on the spiritual loneliness of the addicted mind I've ever heard, either inside or outside of an AA meeting.
Of course, a book based solely on interior monologue would make for a boring read indeed, so Frey has also set this up as a "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"-ish struggle between himself and the Powers That Be, a raft of doctors and counsellors all determined to see him follow Their Rules.
Herein lies the book's greatest strength as a story--and its greatest weakness as a guide to recovery. For we Americans are conditioned from birth to love stories about the triumph of the will. Not the evil Leni Reifenstahl-ish national will that subjugates continents and burns people in ovens, mind you, but the far more seductive individual will. We love stories about rogue cops disobeying the higher-ups to solve the unsolvable cases; we crave stories about cowboys holstering their smoking six-gun and riding off into the sunset. Hero or anti-hero, John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, it doesn't matter--we prefer the triumph of the individual to the triumph of the collective. We'll watch movies about anonymous soldiers braving the machine guns of Omaha Beach to free Europe from the Nazis, but we much prefer to see Indiana Jones take them on all by himself, armed with nothing but a pistol and a bullwhip. Secretly, we all want to win on our own; secretly, we all want Frank Sinatra singing "My Way" over the closing credits of our lives.
The only problem? That's usually the worst way to fight addictions.
Addictions thrive on self will. They love it, they eat it up. Cemetaries and prisons are filled with the wrecked husks of those people who tried to do it Their Way. Most people who aren't addicts or alcoholics don't understand this, and most never will--addicts and alcoholics suffer not from too little willpower, but from too much.
Given this fact, the doctors and counsellors in this book--recovering addicts and alcoholics themselves, mind you--come off not as evil Nurse Ratched clones but as well-meaning would-be helpers, and Frey comes off (to my AA-trained brain, anyway) as immature and wrong in his attitude. For much of the book, he's a child with his hands over his ears screaming to keep any thoughts that aren't his from entering his precious mind, a snarling animal determined to bite the hand that feeds him.
The only thoughts he does allow in come from the Tao Te Ching (helpfully given to him by his brother) and from his fellow friends and addicts. Thanks to these things, and thanks to the personal inventory foisted on him by the clinic staff, Frey begins to rid himself of his demons. To me, this was the book's most delicious--and unintentional--irony: while expressing nothing but contempt for AA and the 12 Steps, he ends up following something very much like them, for the principles upon which AA is founded--the planks to which the steps are nailed, if you will--are sturdy enough that he cannot help but use them, even as he denies doing so. There are only so many ways out of the basement.
Still, like a cheating grade-school student who copies a dictionary entry and makes superficial changes so he can pass it off as his own work, Frey acts like he's done something original and unique. He hasn't, at least as far as recovery goes; the things he believes to be rebellious and original aren't. Going to a bar, even though you're an alcoholic? I hate to burst your bubble, James, but the Big Book actually says that's OK. Hanging around with other addicts and alcoholics who are also trying to stay sober? That's the core of AA, right there.
Make no mistake, I'm glad the author got sober, and I hope those people who read this book and need to get sober will do so. I worry that many will not, for two reasons:
1) The 93.41% of alcoholics and/or addicts who haven't hit such a rock-hard rock-bottom will say, "I've never done anything THAT bad." (Before AA, that's what I used to say to myself when I read stuff like this book.)
2) They, and others, will also say, "He got sober without AA, so obviously it isn't necessary." (I also used to say stuff like this to myself.)
So buy this book and enjoy it, but do so because it is an entertaining novel, because it may or may not help you recover. Frey makes much of the fact that AA only has a 15% success rate after one year, but as far as I know, that still puts the ratio of lives saved by AA to lives saved by the James Frey program at something like Many Many Thousands : One. If this book does help you get sober, drop me a line and let me know; I'd love to be proven wrong on this one, and I'll gladly change the scoreboard on this review. For now, though, I'll keep going to AA meetings; I tried doing things My Way already, and My Way didn't work. Sobriety is a life-long battle, I've learned, and the quickest way to win is by surrendering.
P.S. I wrote this before all the Smoking Gun brouhaha. For my money, I believe the website--they have a strong track record and have never been forced to take down a page because of legal action. There were parts of the book that seemed a little off, but I enjoyed it, so I gave the author the benefit of the doubt. Now, I'd probably give it three stars.
Summary of A Million Little Pieces
At the age of 23, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his front teeth knocked out and his nose broken. He had no idea where the plane was headed nor any recollection of the past two weeks. An alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three, he checked into a treatment facility shortly after landing. There he was told he could either stop using or die before he reached age 24. This is Frey?s acclaimed account of his six weeks in rehab.Book Description
At the age of 23, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his front teeth knocked out and his nose broken. He had no idea where the plane was headed nor any recollection of the past two weeks. An alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three, he checked into a treatment facility shortly after landing. There he was told he could either stop using or die before he reached age 24. This is Frey?s acclaimed account of his six weeks in rehab.
Amazon.com Review
The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days" if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on:
I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.
One of the more harrowing sections is when Frey submits to major dental surgery without the benefit of anesthesia or painkillers (he fights the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until his nails crack). His fellow patients include a damaged crack addict with whom Frey wades into an ill-fated relationship, a federal judge, a former championship boxer, and a mobster (who, upon his release, throws a hilarious surf-and-turf bacchanal, complete with pay-per-view boxing). In the book's epilogue, when Frey ticks off a terse update on everyone, you can almost hear the Jim Carroll Band's brutal survivor's lament "People Who Died" kicking in on the soundtrack of the inevitable film adaptation.
The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut. --Brad Thomas Parsons
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