a million little pieces by james frey (2004)

“The Young Man came to the Old Man seeking counsel.
I broke something, Old Man.
How badly is it broken?
It’s in a million little pieces.
I’m afraid I can’t help you.
Why?
There’s nothing you can do.
Why?
It can’t be fixed.
Why?
It’s broken beyond repair.
It’s in a million little pieces.”

I am totally floored, the awesomeness of this book completely overwhelms me – sheer chutzpah, wanton recklessness and abandon, and staggering brilliance pour page after page after page. There are no chapters in this book but only doodles to allow readers to catch their breath; there are no paragraphs; there are long winded sentences going forever; there are passages reminding me of e.e. cummings; there are no quotation marks but only bold capitalized fonts stressing uncontrollable anger and frustration; and expletives are everywhere.

And then Oprah discovered James Frey; but this is getting ahead of the story.

“A Million Little Pieces” is a drug-and-alcohol laden narrative, written memoir-style, with the big part of the action happening in a rehabilitation centre in Minnesota. According to the administrators of this institution, it has the best success rate of any treatment centre in the world at 17%; and that the only thing that works in rehabilitation is the 12 steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous.

Frey does not believe this in the middle of his alcohol/drug haze and stubbornly refuses to cooperate in his rehabilitation program. The institution, however, seems to know what it is doing as Frey, albeit cussing and acting like the entire world is ganging up on him, slowly starts to reach out to his family, make new friends in the centre, proceeds to do his daily assigned tasks; and tentatively opens up himself to a waif who seems to be even far more wrecked than he is, if such is still possible.

I am startled with these bits of information: that alcoholism is a disease and is classified as such by most doctors and by organizations like the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization; that it is a disease that can be arrested, or placed into a state of remission but it is incurable; that with most diseases, the belief is that the cause is genetic; that the inability to control and the lack of it is a but a symptom of the disease; that removing as many triggers, which are environmental factors that may cause relapse, is an important part of maintaining a healthy recovery program; and that because of the progressive and chronic nature of the illness, when a state of remission is breached, the illness returns at the same level of strength it had when it remissed.

James Frey left the treatment centre in Minnesota in a shape far better than when he got in and with the commitment to prove that AA’s 12 steps is not the only road to rehabilitation. According to the book’s end-page, Frey has never remissed.

Now back to Oprah. It wasn’t long before she included “A Million Little Pieces” in her Book Club and had James Frey guest in her show. She presented him to her millions of adoring fans like a writer has no entitlement to be in the literary map unless his books bear her imprimatur. Then an investigation came out sometime in 2005 and 2006 which showed that parts of Frey’s alleged memoir were untrue. In 26 January 2006, Oprah had James Frey, together with his publisher Nan Talese, in her show again purportedly to be a part of a panel discussion on “Truth In America”. According to Talese, at the last minute, the topic was changed to “The James Frey Controversy”. I am absolutely aghast at how a host can call her guest straight to his face in front of the millions of viewers all over the world that he is a liar. Poor Frey. What must have he felt like trapped in Oprah’s coach underneath the unforgiving klieg lights? I am sure he would have rather been back at the dental chair having a root canal without anaesthesia.

I fail to understand what all this hoopla is about. So, James Frey wasn’t entirely truthful about his criminal record. So Lilly didn’t really commit suicide but only slashed her wrists. Do these details make “A Million Little Pieces become less of a fantastic book than it is? Absolutely not. I am in no small measure angered at all these self-righteousness being bandied about. Are these people demanding 100% uncontaminated unadulterated truth entirely truthful themselves 100% in their lives? Assuming for the sake of argument these people are, how pathetically gullible to believe that a memoir is an accurate record of what transpired. It is after all a memoir precisely because it involves recalling, personal thought processing, and interpretation. It is not a research paper, not a documentary, and not a statistic. Get a sample size of five from one million memoirs written across cultures and I am positive there are myriad supposed inaccuracies we can puncture these personal narratives with.

James Frey has come up this year with a new novel “Bright Shiny Morning” which has appeared in New York Times Bestseller List and is gaining acclaim. Last year, Frey signed a new three book seven figure contract with Harper Collins. A Million Little Pieces and Frey’s other book “My Friend Leonard” both became No. 1 New York Times Bestsellers.

Which just goes to show that you can’t keep a good man down. Not even if you’re publicly hammered by the most influential woman (so they say) in the planet today.

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AA’s 12 steps:
1.We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them al.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.