After the damnation that Oprah and the rest of the media world have brought down on James Frey, it’s easy to forget that, while his work “A Million Little Pieces” is partly fictitious, it is still quite good.Frey’s tale of his own alcohol and drug abuse and the rehab and recovery that followed is an uppercut to the gut of any person who has ever struggled with any kind of addiction.
The book starts out with Frey waking up on an airplane, bloody, hung-over, and missing four teeth, on his way to rehab.
Frey doesn’t fall into the traps that other recovery stories live on. He never relies on tales of human strength against adversity and doesn’t pretend to ever overcome addiction. He states that you just replace addiction with another addiction. Frey’s emotions are all over the place in his book, from fury and rage to the open need for love and attention.
The book chronicles not only Frey’s life in rehab but also how others got along. He speaks of rock stars and suburban dads that shared the clinic with him.
The book feels strange to me. I’ve never been in rehab, and some of the concepts Frey throws out are quite alien. For instance Frey speaks of how the addicts in rehab ranked each other on the basis of addicts they respected.
I don’t know how much of Frey’s tale is true, and it doesn’t matter to me. I haven’t seen a true story on film or TV in my life, so why should I expect to read a story that is entirely true? Hollywood and the entertainment enterprises will damn this book for years to come, but meanwhile the only thing they will create that will come anywhere close to the truth are stories that are “based” on a true story.
In the end Frey’s incredible tale is well written (or as well as a person in rehab can write), gripping and conceptually magnificent, even if it is just “based” on his own life events.