Book reviews by Mobilism's Book Review team
Sep 28th, 2014, 11:49 pm
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TITLE: A Million Little Pieces
AUTHOR: James Frey
GENRE: Either General Fiction or Memoir
PUBLISHED: May 11, 2004
RATING:
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism

Description:
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.

Review:
So, this is how I was introduced to A Million Little Pieces: one summer day in 2004: A colleague came by and pressed a book into my hands. "Read it!" she exclaimed, "It is life changing!". Alas, it was not. (Oddly, years later, another friend used those same words to describe 50 Shades of Grey - and they were wrong about that book as well.) Anyway, as my colleague and I often shared books and taste, I decided to take the paperback home and cracked it open that night.

*Please note I read this prior to the Oprah "scandal". Anyone who is an avid reader probably knows of the controversy with James Frey. You can read The Smoking Gun story for details.

Right away, the cover grabbed me - it's actually one of the best I've seen. And a great title, that tied together well with the cover; I was sucked in completely. But by the end of the first chapter, I was struck with doubt. Frey states he woke up on a plane to somewhere with half his face bashed in and missing teeth, stained with blood, vomit, drunk, and drugged. What man would be allowed to get on a flight like this? Wait! I flip back to that fabulous cover. No - it says "A Memoir". Okay, so now I know he's full of shit, but I figure the poor man is probably delusional from the heavy drug use. I feel pity and suddenly realized he must be developmentally disabled and emotionally stunted from all the chemicals. I keep reading.

Again, the niggling feeling kept coming, this book is fiction, not a memoir. And it's bad fiction to boot. But still, I kept reading. I have heard a lot of people say it doesn't matter that his memoir was a lie, that the book was well written, that it was valuable to those in recovery, that is "spoke to them". Okay, so explore whether the book is well written using criteria most people would use.

1. Does it have a clear and powerful voice and strong characters we can identify with?

The voice is actually very clear and powerful, however, as I said he sounds like he has some sort of mental disability. But I wouldn't say the characters are strong, in fact they are right out of central casting. The mobster, the black New Orleans boxer, the black New Orleans judge - naturally, all become his best friends during his six week stay in rehab. Frey writes what he thinks a tough character might sound like after years of hard drug use. To me, it was not effective - I felt as if his narrative voice was an odd combination of a 6 year old imitating Hemingway's laconic style - and a cartoon character of some sort.

2. Does it have an excellent quality of writing, but is it still accessible to the average reader?

Poor quality of writing. But oh yes, it's accessible to everyone, even the brain damaged. Frey has an odd habit of capitalizing random Nouns in the middle of the Sentence. He carries on for pages and pages about insignificant events. He likes to repeat things several times; i.e., "I miss Lily. I miss Lily. I miss Lily." Also, if he needs to connect ideas, he just drops an "and" in and keeps going.

Here is an example of Frey's love of the conjunction as he describes one of his inexplicable temper tantrums...
"I scream. I see a bed. I grab the end of the bed and I lift it and I flip it and the mattress goes and I grab the simple metal frame and I lift it and I throw it down with everything everything everything and it snaps but it's not enough so I stomp it stomp it stomp it and it snaps again again again and there are only broken bars and bolts and screws and I'm screaming and it feels good and I'm just getting started."

In case you lost track, that was 13 "ands"... in one sentence. And this is his typical style of writing sentences. Sadly, this is the way he writes throughout the entire book. Effective if the voice were true, but in this case not. As we find out from the Smoking Gun, Frey is a rich white kid who graduated from college in 1992. Yet somehow he managed to graduate on time, hold a job, get decent grades whilst shooting, smoking, and huffing so much that the counselors at Hazelden gathered together marveling - they had never seen such a badass. Yet another clue he was lying was the preposterous laundry list of drugs he was supposed to have tried. When I saw huffing glue was on the list, once again I knew the jig was up. No one with a dollar in his pocket and a brain in his head would sniff glue. So, what could have been effective writing from an actual uneducated, damaged ex-con, becomes an insult to the reader, and more importantly it becomes a cruel parody of the people he imitates.

3. Is it believable? Do the scenes ring true? Can you see them before you as you are reading?

Not believable one iota. From the dentist scene, the bar scene, the crackhouse scene, just about every scene - none are realistic. I just could not envision them because I kept imagining himself posturing in front of the mirror, speaking his part with no one else there. He wants so badly to convince us he is a tough guy, but he clearly doesn't know what he is talking about throughout 90% of the book, each scene more unbelievable than the last.

Filled with cheesy dialogue, here is the scene where Frey leaves his six week rehab stint at Hazelden...
“I step forward and I hug her. There is emotion in the hug, and there is respect and a form of love. Emotion that comes from honesty, respect that comes from challenge, and the form of love that exists between people whose minds have touched, whose souls have touched. Our minds touched. Our hearts touched. Our souls touched.”

After this senseless garble, Frey takes us through the hugging of everyone there. Anyone else would say, “We hugged and said goodbye,” Frey also dearly loves to say goodbye and hug, and when he does so, he instructs us so carefully on how it's done that it's as though he's explaining the concept of a hug to someone from another planet...
“Leonard steps forward. He puts his arms around me and he hugs me. I put my arms around him and I hug him. He lets go and he
steps away and he looks in my eyes and he speaks.”

I look back. In his eyes.

‘I’ll miss you, Leonard.’

‘We’ll see each other soon, my Son.’

I nod. I force myself not to cry.”

Oh now we come to another of Frey's odd quirks: the crying. Frey and his friends cry and sob and weep more than Miss Universe contestants. This is the quality that truly turns this novel into "junkie du jour" porn for the masses, the tears squirting are like the cum shot. Oh, naughty young Frey was already such was a hardened criminal but that's okay because he has seen the light, turned his life around and he did it all with white-knuckling his way through, without the benefit of any 12 step program - AND he did it with lots of hugs and tears. Oprah and her minions really ate this up.

4. Is it original? Is it unique, a different twist on the genre? Does it speak to you?

It's definitely a different twist on the genre. Toward the end of the book, Frey visits a bar, rudely orders a double whiskey and then lowers himself to eye level with the whiskey and stares at it, smells it, gets as close to it as possible. After certainly looking like an idiot to bystanders, he demands the bartender take it away. He has proved to himself that is still a badass and is free to strut off to play pool. So, is this a twist? I'd say so. Instead of rehab, recovery, rebuilding, amends, therapy, Frey just decides he's going to stop. No boring AA meetings for Frey, in fact his book is anti-AA, basically saying the organization that has worked for millions is for weak little pussies. This view is a dangerous, irresponsible portrayal of rehab, recovery, and sobriety.

So is A Million Little Pieces original? Not at all. In fact, at the time James Frey was living in Los Angeles and began writing this book, a man named Eddie Little was writing for L.A. Weekly and had already published two novels, Another Day in Paradise (1997) and Steel Toes (2002). Fortunately for Frey, Eddie Little conveniently died in 2003, freeing Frey to poach his novel without any issues whatsoever, lifting his writing style, characters and scenarios - right down to the dentist chair scene.

If you read this excellent article quoting Eddie Little's excellent writing, you will also see where Frey adopts his attitude toward 12 step programs.
Andrew’s house is very much home sweet home, with the yard full of women and kids wearing bright colors; the men taking hits of cold cervezas and wine coolers; the smell of pot hanging sweet and heavy in the air, mixing with the aroma of barbecue

A heroin addict as a youth, he’s put that behind him for now. He kicked the habit on his own, because he sees 12 steps or any kind of program as a cop-out for the weak. “Sitting in a room of sniveling motherfuckers ain’t for me.”

So to sum up: the book is bad, Frey is bad, moreover Frey is a liar and a plagiarist. But wow, does Frey have his finger on the pulse of the sheeple. He was publicly shamed by Oprah, and it took a few years for him to fall (during which time he wrote a sequel up to A Million Little Pieces called My Friend Leonard, which was so vile, I refuse to give it any stars at all). But now he has bounced back, worse than ever. Oh, the writing is better, but that is because other people are writing the books. But he's there behind the curtain, collecting the cash. After all, as The Smoking Gun says: "when you spend paragraphs describing the viscosity of your own vomit, your sexual failings, and the nightmare of shitting blood daily, it's hard to stay in the shadows too long, especially when you're a guy who wears the tattooed acronym FTBSITTTD (Fuck The Bullshit It's Time To Throw Down)."

One star awarded, awarded begrudgingly, and solely for Frey's effort.

To anyone still reading: do yourself a favor and read Eddie Little, he was fantastic, the real thing, a hardened criminal who could write. Reading this little bit of Eddie Little is a little bittersweet, since he died not too long after this was written. Start here and you will recognize Frey's opening pages to A Million Little Pieces - and many other scenes plus all of the grit and swagger - just changed and cleaned up for readers. Sadly, Eddie Little's books are currently only sold used on Amazon, and no one knows his name.
Sep 28th, 2014, 11:49 pm
Sep 29th, 2014, 2:39 am
Excellent review! I couldn't agree more, or have said it better!
What got me right away is "what Airlines would let someone covered in vomit, bleeding and bloody, AND unconscious on the plane anyway? And the way he went on and on "I am a thief, a drug addict, and a criminal" over and over, like he was trying to convince HIMSELF! Well, he wasn't lying when he said he was a thief! He did steal Eddie Little's stories. :D
Sep 29th, 2014, 2:39 am
Sep 29th, 2014, 3:33 pm
Thanks emmalina! I really labored over this review, I felt compelled to reread the damn thing again before starting, and it was even more odious now that I was aware of Frey's vile deeds, both then and now. I'm glad you liked the review.

emmilina wrote:Excellent review! I couldn't agree more, or have said it better!
What got me right away is "what Airlines would let someone covered in vomit, bleeding and bloody, AND unconscious on the plane anyway? And the way he went on and on "I am a thief, a drug addict, and a criminal" over and over, like he was trying to convince HIMSELF! Well, he wasn't lying when he said he was a thief! He did steal Eddie Little's stories. :D
Sep 29th, 2014, 3:33 pm