I got to read this book just a couple of months before the Oprah controversy broke. I remember speaking about it to the Social Work Practice class I taught at the time and noted that I wasn't at all convinced that it was "true." But I did think it had some interesting material in it if you could look past the quite serious horseshit*: the oral surgery, the romantic embraces, the endless vomiting, and ultimately, the heroic vindication.

I certainly enjoyed watching Frey squirm as he tried to parse what he understood is meant by "memoir" as if he were not the only person in existence who understands it that way.

What was good was some of the perception (after you remove the intense egoism of Frey) of the co-residents of his particular unit. I treat dozens of people a week. They aren't all whores with hearts of gold, or Mafiosi with souls of poets, but they are all real humans who have been beaten up and beaten down by something that has gotten way out of their control. And they all deserve the chance to get better and get on with life. Frey catches a bit of that.

What was bad is the relentless Freyism that states that you don't have to seriously address your behavior or your underlying character in order to beat an addiction. Frey goes into treatment as a jerk, behaves in treatment as a jerk, and leaves treatment as a jerk. Doesn't work that way. Frey seems to ascribe his "success" to his adamant refusal to be a nice guy and listen to anyone else's perspective.

Basically, the book never was a redemptive saga of a person caught up in drugs and crime. James Frey was essentially a nobody, with some minor traffic violations, maybe doing a little weed, some pills or even some cocaine. Not much to make a book. So he creates a fictional uber-James Frey. It wasn't a little weed or blow, it was drug doses that would kill a normal street junkie. Not a petty disorderly conduct, it was hard time on the Rock sparring with hardbody street toughs. Not a treatment where you sit in groups and listen for hours, it was railing with your strong will against the mind-numbing, soul-destroying system. At certain points, I almost rolled on the floor with laughter.

How do you get spectacular redemption unless you blow everything way out of proportion? Real treatment and redemption in the real world takes months and months (and years and years) of looking at yourself and making thousands of little changes in what you think and feel and do. Instead, Frey offers a formula where there is an inherent nobility and redemption in being a jerk.

*horseshit is a technical term in the literature wheeze

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.'

This book was originally published as a memoir in 2003, purportedly about the author's experience overcoming a drug addiction as young adult. After Oprah added it to her book club list in 2005, it became a #1 NYT best seller. Under the scrutiny of a wider audience, people began to question if the author's claims were true, because the story was gratuitously shocking and gross. After it came to light that the most of it was fabricated or extremely embellished, Oprah and many readers were outraged when they learned they had been duped.

I heard of it for the first time when the scandal hit the news, which piqued my interest. I was curious if it would be good any good knowing it was fiction or if most of what made it good was believing that someone actually overcame so much adversity. I gave it 3 stars when I rated it on a different website in 2007, so that's what I'm giving it on goodreads, but I read it more than 10 years ago as if this review (March 2017) and I was just out of college back then. I have a feeling I'd give it a lower rating if I read it again now. I can't remember much about it anymore though.