I know why this book either will "sit" on certain shelves, or perhaps none at all. Despite the difficulty (due to various personal reasons) of reading it, as well as what was/is left behind from doing so, there are many wordless shelves into which this book will not fit. Some books do that to the mind, heart, and/or the soul. In other words, I'm writing this review because I don't yet know what to say, and perhaps I never will.

However, for those of you who know, who found in one way or another, about the controversy regarding this writer and whether or not he truly experienced what happened behind the words, well let me just say this. Whether or not he experienced it firsthand, someone did. And the fact that someone knew what that "forever-altering" sort of life lived can be like, whether personally, or witnessed through the eyes and experience of a friend or foe... one sort of overwhelming way or another... Reading this book is worth the while of those previously mentioned, or anyone else at all. Anyone...

Therefore, for the time being, this book remains "shelf-less".

This is the saddest, dumbest, most pathetic piece of male power fantasy ever written.

"Okay, so like this one time I was a total drug addict. I totally did more drugs than anyone else and no one else would have lived if they did as many drugs as me. Anyway, then I had like all these cuts and there was blood everywhere and my teeth went through my face. Yeah. And then, like, the doctors were going to sew me up and do surgery and stuff--like, really painful surgery, like, literally as painful as a root canal, and they couldn't give me any pain killer because of all the other drugs and me being an addict and whatever, so I could feel everything, and I just, like, held on really tight and let them do it. Yeah. And then there was the rehab place, and like, there were tough guys who were maybe going to fight me, but I just like, looked at them, and then they knew to leave me alone. Cuz I'm just really, like, hardcore. And there was this federal judge guy, like really important, and he totally couldn't handle his shit, and he was all, "what do I do?" And I told him how to handle his shit, and then he like, made it so I didn't have to go to prison for any of the stuff I did, because I basically saved his life. And then there was this mafia guy, he basically adopted me as his son, so I'm like, tight with the Godfather and stuff. Oh, and there was a chick, she was really into me, but then she died or something."

"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.

It was no surprise when it came out he fictionalized parts-except maybe that Oprah believed him.

I read this after the scandal of Frey's embellishments came out. I found I was angry through the entire book, but once I committed to over 100 pages, I felt I had to finish it. When all is said and done, I'm not sure what to believe and what to discard as fantasy.

I read this book knowing that parts of the story were embellished, even though it was marketed as a memoir. So with that out of the way, I could read it as a story based on a true story.

This story details the author's rehabilitation at the age of 23 after he had spent over a decade abusing alcohol and drugs. He hits rock bottom and in desperation his family books him into a treatment facility, where he goes on a journey about what it means to be an addict and how one can deal with the addiction.

He rejects the 12 steps, and looks at overcoming addiction in a very enlightening way. I don't know much about addiction, but I found this book very interesting and I enjoyed the gritty details.

The writing style is a bit odd, with no real application of proper grammar, but it's an engaging story that kept me riveted.

"As I looked around the room I saw that she was reading a book in one of the beds. Light streamed through one of the windows and across her face and I had never seen anything or anyone so beautiful in my life. If my heart had stopped at that moment I woul dhave fallen happy and fallen full and I would have seen in life all that I had wanted to see and all that I needed to see. Fall. Let me fall."

"... her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can feel her heart beat and if she let me go right now I would fall and the need and confusion and fear and regret and horror and shame and weakness and fragility are exposed to the soft strength of her open arms..."

"... [she] cradles me like a broken child. My face and her shoulder and her shirt and her hair are wet with my tears. I slow down and I start to breath slowly and deeply and her hair smells clean and I open my eyes because I want to see it and it is all that I can see. It is... radiant with moisture. I want to touch it amd O reach with one of my hands and I run my hand from the crown along her neck and her back to the base of her rib and it is a thin perfect sheer and I let it slowly drop from the tips of my fingers and when it is gone I miss it."

"When she walks in my heart jumps and my hands shake and me myself inside settles it settles and those things for which there are no words ignite and they start firing firing firing."

"The first time I saw you, my heart fell. The second time I saw you, my heart fell. The third time fourth time fifth time and every time since, my heart has fallen. I stared at her. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Your hair, your eyes, your lips, your body that you haven't grown into, the way you walk, smile, laugh, the way your cheeks drop when you're mad or upset, the way you drag your feet when you're tired. Every single thing about you is beautiful. I stared at her. When I see you the world stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothign else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The world justs tops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you. Just you, and my eyes staring at you. I stared. When you're gone, the world starts again, and I don't like it as much. I can live in it, but I don't like it. I just walk around in ti amd wait to see you again and wait for it to stop again. I love it when it stops. It's the best thing I've ever known or ever felt, the best thing, and that, beautiful girl, is why I stare at you."

"She smiled brighter, wider, a smile more full of what she is, which is beautiful. Inside and out. The smile. Her. Beautiful."

Being a recovering drunk myself, I found Frey's book to be thoroughly annoying. People in addiction tend to be self-absorbed people and this is one of the things we're trying to learn not to be when we stop drinking/using. Frey portrays a character who stops using but doesn't really change. He becomes more annoying and self-absorbed with his cliched eastern religious study and trip to the dentist without pain med's which I found totally unbelievable and unhealthy.
The good thing about the book was his portrayal of life for a substance abuser. What I really got out of it was how highly self-absorbed drunks and drug addicts are even when we write crappy books about it.

Mi-am permis ca in grădina lecturilor mele, să cresc pe lângă rândurile de flori frumos aranjate şi vreo două tufe de boscheţi altoiţi. Aşadar, vă prezint această poveste spasmatică, plină de agonie frenetică şi presărata din plin cu un limbaj buruienos, destul de piperat: viața într-un centru de dezintoxicare. Romanul e o dublă devitalizare fără anestezie, o realitate ce-ți biciuieşte simțurile şi le surescitează în cel mai crunt mod posibil: droguri, alcool, întuneric, durere, delir şi vedenii, zbucium şi tortură. O carte ce te decuplează de realitate şi te trimite în cruda şi tenebroasa viaţă a unui om ce se luptă cu dependența, cu eul său bolnav şi ahtiat, otravit de vicii şi demoni. E lupta unui om care vrea să iasă din iadul infernal şi duce o luptă crâncenă între instinct şi voinţă. Veți experimenta cum e să te simți fizic, psihic şi emoțional in pielea unui drogat, alcoolist şi infractor. Are 22 de ani, bea de la 10 ani, s-a drogat de la 12 ani...
Dacă doriți să simțiți adrenalina la cote mari, vă recomand această ploaie cu gheață.

The first part of this book is well done. Frey does describe what it is like to be an addict well. I'm one & I know. After that, it was pure fiction - very dangerous fiction for an addict.

From his description, I believe he went to the same treatment center as I did. They would never allow him to run his own program or pull half the crap he said he did. His best thinking & will power got him to treatment. It isn't logical nor part of any reputable treatment plan, to allow the addict to cure himself. If it was, none of us would ever be in a treatment center in the first place. I went there because it was that or death.

My mother read the book & said it gave her an insight into my disease she had never had before. Kudos for that. Seriously, I am most thankful & it's the only reason this didn't get a single star. She believed the whole book - I knew most of it was fiction way before Oprah finally got around to saying it.

Thumbs down to Oprah on this one - she had to know it too, from her medical expert who supposedly told her well before air time. As for Mr. Frey, he got his moment of fame, probably a lot of money & hopefully he really isn't an addict or it will likely kill him.

There are better ways for a loved one to know what it is like to be an addict. If that person won't go to AA, NA or Alanon - if you think this is the only way for them to learn - by all means give them the book. Just rip the last half to 2/3 of it out first.

I just love you, James!

[This review is excerpted from a essay I wrote for my blog in 2005]

I started reading A Million Little Pieces in the spring of 2003, shortly before its April release. Our friendly neighborhood Random House rep knew I was a shameless trauma junkie, and when she slid the reviewer's copy across the breakroom table I snapped it up.

It was immediately clear to me that this was not a factual book. This is not to say that I thought it was untrue — far from it — but merely that it did not strike me from the outset as a narrative concerned with facts. Were I writing a review of the book I would say that it is "a deeply impressionistic narrative told (for deliberate artistic effect) in a well-contrived matter-of-fact style and voice. The narrative persona often seems to be saying nothing much beyond 'this happened, then this happened, then this happened....' But this flatline voice becomes very quickly an eloquent mode of relating emotions and inner states, all of them tormented and damaged." But I don't write book reviews. The books works, in the opinion of this reader, and it made me a big fan.

This past July I met James Frey. He struck me and others I was with as a surprisingly arrogant individual, given how shy he seemed at the same time. His frank admission of the literary aspirations that led him to write A Million Little Pieces was impressive in its near-megalomaniacal ambition. He stated that he wrote A Million Little Pieces in the style he did as part of a carefully-conceived plan to win a lasting place among literary greats like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce. Nothing like aiming high for yourself.

And now it is revealed: he made it up. Not the whole thing, but pretty big details that, if disqualified, leave us with a pretty tame story bereft of much of tension and narrative drive that fills the book as published. His true story was not, apparently, nearly so thrilling as the narrator in the book would have us believe. Which revelation leads to an outraged public and an even more outraged community of non-fiction writers, who seem to feel that Mr. Frey has irreparably harmed the reputation of the genre and jeopardized their chances at getting their own books published and read by tens of thousands of readers.

What is my opinion of Frey's literary transgression? He now admits that he did indeed lie to us, his readers. He appears to have gone beyond the 'acceptable' bounds of embellishment and given us in his arrogance a tale of the tub, and played us all for suckers. (Unless, of course he is lying about having lied...) Does that make him a charlatan, his literary achievement a fraud? Perhaps. It is certainly disappointing. Yet it does not utterly discredit him for me. When I was reading the book, it was clear to me that this was not a narrative of events so much as the impression of an experience. From an external point of view I knew it was too amazing to be true, yet between the covers of the book, it was true, and that is the only real criterion I insist be met in my reading. In the case of A Million Little Pieces, I was satisfied.


But enough about Mr. Frey. I have bigger fisher to fry now. (Don't even think that there was a pun there.) In all the fracas this past month a troubling theme has been constant. Those who are upset over this incident are operating on an expectation that is to my mind completely unrealistic: the expectation of objective truth in memoir. In fact, in most of the punditry on this, it strikes me that there is a widespread application of journalistic expectations being imposed (inappropriately) to a genre where they do not apply.

Journalists report to us facts, at least that is the assumption we still operate under for the most part. When that 'contract' is breached, as it has been in a handful of highly-publicized cases in recent years, the public is rightly outraged. We read the newspapers and newsweeklies with an expectation of a high level of concrete factual reporting, backed up by carefully-researched and scrupulously-verified evidence and testimony. We expect journalistic integrity. Such are the parameters of the journalistic genre, and its practitioners are painfully aware that they must work within them, or reap the whirlwind.

Does the same apply for the writer of a personal memoir? I do not believe it does, nor that it should. The memoirist is not (typically) a journalist. Nor is he or she under obligation to provide the public with timely information of a factual nature. Instead, he or she is voluntarily sharing, with widely-varying degrees of candor, their personal lived experience, often after a passage of some years from the events described. In some cases the memoirist may employ journalistic techniques to verify their recollections against other sources, in others they might not. But the primary source for the memoir is — like the word says — the memory of the author, the one who remembers. He or she is attempting an 'eyewitness' account of their own lived experience, and such an undertaking, based on individual memory, is simply not going to result in a 'true' story in the sense that the public seems to suddenly demand.

As a reader, I do not turn to memoir seeking objective truth. I am going out on a shaky ideological limb here, but I do not see objective truth as possible in the relation — written or verbal — of personal lived experience. The memory of lived experience is distorted through so many psychological lenses under the tamest of circumstances that it is hardly to be trusted; and memoir as a genre often deals with circumstances that are far from tame. Indeed, in cases of extreme and traumatic experience, it is often only in the distortion of the memory that any narrative is able to emerge, and from that distortion we have received many great and powerful works, particularly those emerging from the devastating events that filled far too much of the twentieth century.

This is not to say there cannot be truth in memoir; there usually is, sometimes a great deal of it. But I believe it misguided to attempt to certify any memoir as objectively true, or to try to hold such work to the same standards that works of journalism or historical research are held to. The distinction may seem pedantic, but I believe it to be an important one. To say something is objectively true makes a claim of empiricism that individual memory can never, never support. And further, I fiercely hold that we as readers have absolutely no right to demand such empiricism from memoirists.

Is this to say that all memoirs are lies, their authors liars? No! Am I proposing that there is a different standard of truth for memoirists. Yes. I do not need every, or any, detail of his ordeal to be empirically verified, or verifiable. I don't want testimonials from witnesses protesting the veracity of the text (a la The Book of Mormon), nor do I want a disclaimer pointing out which bits "really happened" and which bits are just made up. I just want to feel the truth in the narrative. I did so when I read Frey's book. If the reading public gets irredeemably hung up on holding memoirists to unreasonable standards of factuality, the result will inevitably be an impoverished output of memoirs. Memory is what it is, and a person shouldn't have to research their own life. If people can't read a memoir with a grain of salt, then why are they reading a memoir to begin with? Did anyone read Art Spiegelman's Maus and come away believing that Jews had the heads of rodents? I should hope not. Again, I am not trying to defend Frey's choices; I am trying to defend a beautiful genre from a public that seems to have forgotten what it is reasonable for them to expect.