A Million Little Pieces: the Media has Missed the Important Pieces
Review: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
Good attitude; flawed analysis
Addict James Frey’s story of his own “Leaving Las Vegasâ€-style bottom from which he recovered was originally marketed to publishers as fiction. It has been outed by www.TheSmokingGun.com as fiction. The trouble is that Frey had to call his story a “memoir”in order to sell it. Frey lied, even to Oprah, who is deeply “embarrassed and disappointed”and feels duped for recommending the book and making it the September 2005 Oprah book club selection of the month. While every word could have been real and forms a composite of the young late-stage poly-drug addict, the fact that so much was embellished has created one of the great literary scandals.
I read A Million Little Pieces almost two years ago. Despite my abundance of notes and the fact that it was already a runaway best seller, I opted not to review the book when, several months later, I began writing the addiction report. Quite simply, there are better books about addicts, including Martha Morrison’s autobiographical White Rabbit and B. D. Hyman’s biographical sketch of her famous mother Bette Davis, My Mother’s Keeper. Far more interesting to the drug addiction recognition expert is that addiction, while explaining the misbehaviors of the subject, progresses undetected by most observers during the early and middle stages of the disease. Frey, due to the plethora of drugs he ingested, seems to have been catapulted to obvious late-stage addiction by age 16. The period before”he was sneaking drinks by age 7 (p. 86) and obviously triggered alcoholism by age 10 (86 and 218)”was virtually ignored. This is unfortunate, since whatever misbehaviors he exhibited might serve as examples of behavioral indications of addiction in children. Such examples could help parents snuff out the active disease in a young person, increasing the odds that the sort of tragic experiences Frey later endured might be prevented.
Frey’s early slip into late-stage addiction became manifest in his beliefs. The deceptions in his story are relatively unimportant when compared to the myths of addiction his work serves to sustain. “The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness….There is only an obsession”(159). Tell that to a young Lennon, Elvis, Marilyn, Elizabeth Taylor or Ted Turner. Observe in retrospect the far more typical alcoholic, who nurtures his or her addiction for decades before the body and life disintegrate due to a failure of the brain to produce neurotransmitters on its own. The idea that his addiction may have been triggered during his first drinking episode seems to go unrecognized. At age 7 he was stealing drinks because “It made me feel better about myself for some reason, and I liked it, liked it more than anything I had ever experienced. I did it as much and as often as I could, which was fairly often”(218). Yet at age 23 he said, “I’ve been an Alcoholic for a decade and a drug Addict and Criminal for almost as long”(153). Sorry Mr. Frey, but if you were stealing drinks at age 7 and it immediately gave you that classic inflated sense of self, you were an alcoholic for 16 years, not ten. Your readers would have been well served by the stories of misbehaviors during those early years.
Worse, Frey doesn’t understand his own addiction as a biochemical disorder. While to his credit he is adamant about accepting responsibility for using, he insists that addiction is a decision (258) and ignores the idea that behaviors as a result of use are not within the power of the addict to control. “I won’t accept disease and genetics as the cause of [alcoholism]. It makes it too easy to deflect the responsibility for what I have done….”Although the diabetic must own a disease over which he has no choice, the alcoholic cannot accept responsibility unless the affliction is a choice. He even implies that his loneliness and inability to relate to other kids his age caused his addiction (73-74). An unaware drug counselor insists on trying to get at “the source of your anger”(201), which Frey throughout the book calls his “furyâ€, and on uncovering “the source of your addiction and what the root causes might be”(262), seemingly unaware that addiction caused his fury (or, if it existed at age 7, prevented him from growing out of it). His good attitude in accepting responsibility is derailed by faulty analysis, misleading millions of readers.
Still, there are a number of salient points. While a drug counselor said that Frey had a “psychological predisposition to addiction”(133) and he must have had a bad childhood (223), Frey informs us his parents were caring and non-abusive. He admits, ever-so-briefly (78) that he destroyed relationships (much of the book is spent recalling relationships he attempted to build in rehab). He writes his own obituary as others would write it, euphemizing and even ignoring the addiction that drove his life (85). He attempts to eliminate his enablers by telling his parents, “If I relapse, you can’t Bail me out again. This is my last chance. I need it to be that way because if I know there’s a safety net, I’ll use it.”(291) Frey points out that good men look like bad men when they are practicing addicts (13) and that addicts all start out life as normal people (295). Unfortunately, these key messages are buried inside 382 pages of text and muddied by the myth that addiction”a biochemical processing of the drug that causes some people to act destructively some of the time”is a choice.