Heather Powell Browne's Reviews > A Million Little Pieces

I recently finished the roller-coaster ride that is James Frey's (mostly) autobiographical novel A Million Little Pieces. Surely many of you have seen the controversy over this book which has left Oprah "very disappointed" in author James Frey. She feels taken advantage of by the fact that he seems to have fictionalized several incidents in the book. It is unfortunate that Frey lied (his book would have been just as good with strictly the truth), and I am not condoning lying (am I?), but let's hear Heather's take on it.

This is an astoundingly riveting book which I picked up in an airport bookstore in spite of the Oprah's Book Club sticker on the front. Raw and affecting, Frey's memoir reveals the "self-inflicted apocalypse" that is hard-core drug addiction. It offers unflinching insight into the loathing and despair that comes with it, and the very long, very hard road back from it.

The book opens with Frey waking up on an airplane at age 23 after ten-plus years of intense, regular, hard drug use. "I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something dripping down my chin. I lift my hand to feel my face. My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut." Frey has no idea where he is or how he got there. When he lands in Chicago, he is met by his parents who take him to a rehab facility. It's either that or he will end up dying from the copious drug use which has almost exhausted his system; mind-staggering amounts of alcohol ("every day, when I wake up, as much as I can"), cocaine ("every day, as much as I can, lately crack, but in every form that exists"), pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP, glue. When he takes these things, it temporarily quiets what he calls "The Fury," the murderous, screaming fury inside of him.

As Frey works through all the crap in his life and tries to salvage his relationships, who he is, and come to terms with what he has done, his writing reverberates and aches with pain and honest intensity, but I appreciate that he doesn't slide into maudlin prose. It is terse. It is to the point. He is dealing with The Question posed to him on the rehab self-assessment quiz:

"My sins are unpardonable. True or false?
I stare at the question.
My sins are unpardonable.
I stare at the question.
My sins are unpardonable.

I leave it blank."

I thought that the merits of this book outweigh the fact that there are fictionalized incidents. To me, it's like that whole period in his life was so out of control, so destructive, blurred, surreal, so....falling apart, that the point remains even if the details were not exactly as they occurred. The essence of the book, for me, remains the same in light of the current revelations. It's not as if I went and sobbed in a hot shower, curled in a ball, when I heard that not *every* incident in the book happened exactly like he said. It is a still a recommended read on my shelf.