lection
home authors titles dates links aboutWhen Frey's Million Little Pieces was assumed to be a memoir, the general public, reviewers, and Oprah alike found it un-put-downable. The book struck chords across the American scale. Or rather, it offered a way for Americans to start playing sonatas without having to learn chords or practice their scales. Here was an addict who was willing to cut through the longwinded, preachy nonsense of the twelve-step racket. A real man who not only faced his demons but stared them down and won. A tough, forgiving, simpatico character, sensitive, appealing to women but vigorous in defense of his hetero masculinity (two key scenes show the narrator getting rough with gay seducers). A gentle college grad who mixes with mobsters, ex-prize-fighters, and hardbitten brawlers and earns their respect. If sales figures are an indication, we loved this guy. And Oprah, for quite a while, remained true to her reading experience. As she told Larry King, in a call she later said she regretted:
I feel about "A Million Little Pieces" that although some of the facts have been questioned -- and people have a right to question, because we live in a country that lets you do that, that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me.
Evidently, when the heat became too great, the message stopped resonating. But it remains fascinating that while the label "memoir" was attached to the book, and even while it began to peel off, the message of redemption stayed vital. Only when the label "fiction" irrefutably replaced that of "memoir" did the book come to seem a sham.
In some ways, this is just natural disillusionment. It's like the feeling you get when an addict friend claims to be clean and you wander in on them using in the bathroom during a party. Aw, man, we wish that weren't true.
But it's worse because the nonsense keeps reverberating as something we subscribed to and can't easily disavow. In A Million Little Pieces the narrator does some frankly unbelievable things. He wanders out of rehab and into a drug den to rescue his AWOL girlfriend from the clutches of drugs and prostitution, facing down her captors alone and empty-handed, like Clint Eastwood without a gun. Later, graduating from rehab despite skipping Steps 1-3 in favor of just Steps 4 and 5 (moral inventory and admission of wrongs, which ironically now we have to assume were bogus as well), Frey's narrator strides into a generic bar, sits at a generic barstool, and orders a tumbler of whiskey, which he proceeds to engage in a staring contest. He wins! None of this relapse stuff for our narrator. The only step that really matters is the big first step straight into steely sobriety.
Well, that's a wish-fulfillment, and a crowing, nasty kind of wish-fulfillment at that. And Oprah and a bunch of others identified with it.
I was prepared, in planning this review, to examine the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. It's still a worthwhile project. If Frey's book had been openly a novel, it would have had the same narrative appeal (which despite its hokey hard-boiled prose and its temperance-novel clichés, is considerable). But in the end, I have to conclude that the book just isn't good enough to merit serious analysis, let alone defense (the kind of brief I'd seriously prepare for that other weird novel-as-memoir-as-bio of recent years, Edmund Morris's fascinating Dutch). It's got a pulpy energy that keeps you reading, and it has a flair for scenes of self-mutilation that provide a certain frisson. It's now added to those qualities the train-wreck appeal for the reader of trying to figure out how deep a hole of mendacity it can dig for itself. But it's ultimately a profound act of braggadocio -- the very quality it says that it abhors -- and it is deeply scornful of people who need support and faith to manage their problems.
A Million Little Pieces will remain a fascinating item in the history of projections and fabulations that people wish were true. Whatever Jim Frey's demons, the demons of so many of his readers loom much larger in American culture and the human condition.
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces (2003). New York: Anchor, 2004.