A Million Little Pieces

by James Frey

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping memoir about the nature of addiction and the meaning of recovery from a bold and talented literary voice. “Anyone who has ever felt broken and wished for a better life will find inspiration in Frey’s story.” —People

“A great story.... You can't help but cheer his victory.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

By the time he entered a drug and alcohol treatment facility, James Frey had taken his addictions to near-deadly extremes. He had so thoroughly ravaged his body that the facility’s doctors were shocked he was still alive. The ensuing torments of detoxification and withdrawal, and the never-ending urge to use chemicals, are captured with a vitality and directness that recalls the seminal eye-opening power of William Burroughs’s Junky.

But A Million Little Pieces refuses to fit any mold of drug literature. Inside the clinic, James is surrounded by patients as troubled as he is—including a judge, a mobster, a one-time world-champion boxer, and a fragile former prostitute to whom he is not allowed to speak—but their friendship and advice strikes James as stronger and truer than the clinic’s droning dogma of How to Recover. James refuses to consider himself a victim of anything but his own bad decisions, and insists on accepting sole accountability for the person he has been and the person he may become—which runs directly counter to his counselors' recipes for recovery.

James has to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he has lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he holds. It is this fight, told with the charismatic energy and power of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, that is at the heart of A Million Little Pieces: the fight between one young man’s will and the ever-tempting chemical trip to oblivion, the fight to survive on his own terms, for reasons close to his own heart. "

• ISBN10: 0307276902
• ISBN13: 9780307276902
• Publish Date: 22 September 2005 (first published 14 April 2003)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Random House Inc
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 448
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780307276902

Reviews

[Grace]

I wanted to like this book. His candid descriptions of drug addiction and the recovery process were truly fascinating. But knowing that some of the events weren't true bothered me. Some say that that's creative license, and I say that's fine, but he marketed the book as a memoir, which to me implies that everything is as true as he can remember, and only the unimportant details (like what someone was wearing or the exact wording of dialogue) are fudged. Frey admitted, after someone called him out on it, that some of the significant events in the book weren't true, which detracted from the impact of the whole book for me, not knowing what really happened and what didn't. I also wasn't a fan of his stylistic choice to capitalize certain nouns (like "People," "Room," etc.), use no quotation marks on dialogue, and not indent his paragraphs. I probably would have let it slide if he had just capitalized Addict, Addiction, Criminal, and that sort of thing, but he capitalized so many unimportant objects that it was distracting. The lack of quotation marks and indentations simply made it difficult to read, difficult to sink myself into the story. I had to read actively so I could differentiate dialogue from narration and identify who was speaking. If you think you're willing to look past the writing style, it's a good book, but--fair warning--definitely not to be read while eating. I have a fairly strong stomach, but there were a few scenes where I had to put the book down until I was done eating, and afterwards I could only read a few lines at a time, shutting the book and closing my eyes for a few seconds in between.