A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

This is the second book I read over the holidays, and I would've written about it sooner, but life got in the way. I read this after a friend highly recommended it to me. You may have heard about it in the news lately because there is some controversy over the validity of some of the information within.

A Million Little Pieces is the memoir of James Frey's stay in a rehab clinic when he was 23 years old. It opens with Frey waking up on a plane: bloody, bruised, and swollen. His front four teeth are knocked out, there is a hole in his cheek, and he can barely see out of his eyes because they are so swollen. He has no idea how he got on the plane or where he is going. He is obviously suffering from alcohol and drug use. He gets off the plane where he find his parents waiting for him. They put him in their car and take him to a rehab clinic where he makes some life-altering decisions.

The rest of the memoir is his physical, mental, and emotional journey through his addiction. It is a vivid description of the thought processes an addict goes through. At times it is very grotesque, but very real. As a daughter of a parent who has struggled with addiction, this story gave me a new insight into the thoughts running through an addict's mind and the reasons a person does the things they do. When I put this book down, I wept. Not only for James Frey, but also for anyone struggling with any type of addiction.

I don't care if anyone is challenging the validity of this book. I don't care if some of the information included within the story is found to be false. No one can deny that this is a well-written, life-impacting story. I am adding this to my top ten list of books!

"The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days" if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on: I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.
One of the more harrowing sections is when Frey submits to major dental surgery without the benefit of anesthesia or painkillers (he fights the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until his nails crack). His fellow patients include a damaged crack addict with whom Frey wades into an ill-fated relationship, a federal judge, a former championship boxer, and a mobster (who, upon his release, throws a hilarious surf-and-turf bacchanal, complete with pay-per-view boxing). In the book's epilogue, when Frey ticks off a terse update on everyone, you can almost hear the Jim Carroll Band's brutal survivor's lament "People Who Died" kicking in on the soundtrack of the inevitable film adaptation.
The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut."--Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com

Read a few pages on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0307276902/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-9690654-4430235#reader-link

If you read this and enjoy it, check out the sequel, My Friend Leonard.