"A Million Little Pieces" is James Frey's recollection of his days in a rehabilitation center. He woke up on a plane not remembering anything and his parents decided to admit him to a program called the Twelve Steps. He described everything from surgery to landscape graphically, often in horrific details. The story is told in the first person perspective. I believe the author did this on purpose to put forward his point of view but sometimes there are fallacies in his line of reasoning.

James Frey uses short sentences and repeat certain phrases to emphasize what he says. It's like staccato in music. Short, brief and repetitive. Sometimes the sentences are random and run over another. It is indistinguishable where one sentence ends and another begins because the lack of punctuations. However, that way the readers are able to follow the author's rapid and unsystematic train of thought.

I didn't know anything about the controversy over "A Million Little Pieces." I knew about it after I started reading the book and I don't understand why people make such a fuss about the book being fiction or non-fiction. As far as I'm concerned James Frey has a story to tell and the book was written based on the his experience and memory, regardless the objective truth of his memory. I know how fickle human memory is. Sometimes you remember things not as they were but as it were to be, distort it as you want it to be.

Despite the embellishment, glorification, and controversy over the book, I think James Frey did a great job telling the life he had as he remembers it. I don't see anything wrong with the way he tells the story. He is writing a novel, not a term paper or a thesis. As Arthur Golden put it in "Memoirs of A Geisha," a memoir is different from a biography. So there is bound to be distortion because it is written as the author remembers it, not as how another person might objectively observe it as in a biography.

i approached this book with a pretty clean slate: it had been recommended by my sister (typically of good taste, natch) and i enjoy memoirs. reason 'nuff. i knew there was controversy surrounding its factual integrity, but hadn't read about that specifically. i also knew the book ought to stand on its own from a literary perspective, with or without controversy, so proceeded an open (eager?) mind.
i don't know which aspects of the book were exaggerated by the author; frankly, NONE of it felt authentic to me. as a reader i was uninvested in his "struggle" and i rarely felt like any of the gruesome things that happened in the book were anything but choices the author made, never situations of circumstance or mistake or chance.
nonetheless, frey patted himself on the back fairly consistently throughout this book for overcoming each self-constructed obstacle. i can't say i sympathized with his 'achievements' at any point; he was kind of a jerk to anyone who tried to help him, and subsequently (and thanklessly) took said person's help every single time. i felt like every sentence written in the book was an attempt at memorializing himself as a hero to anyone who'd listen.
additionally, i couldn't help but read his dialogue as anything but the same tacky brevity of that during a shootoff in a western movie (james frey cast conveniently as the star/hero/tough guy, of course.)
why is this book as widely-received as it is? i'm puzzled. maybe this memoir should have been filed under 'mystery.'

I just can't describe what I felt after reading the book!! My emotions are missed up!!
Am going to write the rest of my review later on