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A Million Little Pieces
James Frey
as intense and perfectly detailed an account of a human quitting his drug and alcohol dependency as you are likely to read. And James Frey is horribly honest and funny in a young-guard Eggers and Wallace sort of way, but perhaps more contained and measure
Oprah's Book Club Selection
Anchor
September 2005
Featuring: James Frey
448 pages
ISBN: 0307276902
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
Intense, unpredictable, and instantly engaging, A
Million Little Pieces is a story of drug and alcohol
abuse and rehabilitation as it has never been told before.
Recounted in visceral, kinetic prose, and crafted with a
forthrightness that rejects piety, cynicism, and self-pity,
it brings us face-to-face with a provocative new
understanding of the nature of addiction and the meaning of
recovery. 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. A Million Little Pieces is an uncommonly genuine
account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed. It is
also the introduction of a bold and talented literary voice.
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