A Million Little Pieces

James Frey

Reviewed by Lee Lemon Peoples

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was not at all bothered by all the controversy. Yes, I agree Frey should have called it fiction––autobiographical fiction––because even without being told, I knew that much of what he wrote had to be an embellishment of the truth or just downright fiction. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez notes at the beginning of his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” (He received the Nobel Prize for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.)

James Frey in A Million Little Pieces tells the story of how he overcame his drug and alcohol addiction. Upon entering the rehab center, his life was virtually in a million little pieces, echoed by his simple style of writing. Simple, staccato-like sentences, dialogue without the usual quotation marks move the action steadily along. I have great empathy for anyone who fights to overcome an addiction of any kind, especially one that is as destructive as the drugs to which he was addicted. During the initial screening, he admits to the nurse his use of “alcohol, cocaine, pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP, and glue.”

James at the time was twenty-three and resided in North Carolina. Someone had put him on an airplane from Washington, D. C., to Chicago. He was badly beaten and bleeding, and he had no recollection of what had happened to him. When he arrived in Chicago, his parents convinced him to enter the clinic. They had received a call from the friend who told them he had fallen face first down an elevator shaft and that he thought they should find him some help. Given the only choice he had, James agreed to seek help. He entered the oldest residential drug and alcohol treatment facility in the world. The facility, located in Massachusetts, has the highest success rate of any other facility: about seventeen percent––patients who are sober one year after they leave. Both men and women are treated here, and one of the strictest rules is there is to be no contact between the sexes other than hello and good-bye. However, very early in his rehabilitation, he meets Lilly. They fall in love, further complicating both their recoveries.

He forms close friendships with other recovering addicts, among whom was Leonard, a special friend and the subject of another book My Friend Leonard.

Many of the personnel are former addicts: Ken, his counselor; Lincoln, his unit supervisor; Joanne, a staff psychologist.

In the end, James is successful in overcoming his addiction, and that is what matters.