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By James Frey
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2005
The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then
23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit
and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing
four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks
him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days"
if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on:
I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous
alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want
a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than
a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.
One of the more harrowing sections is when Frey submits to major dental surgery without the benefit of anesthesia or
painkillers (he fights the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until
his nails crack). His fellow patients include a damaged crack addict with whom Frey wades into an ill-fated relationship,
a federal judge, a former championship boxer, and a mobster (who, upon his release, throws a hilarious surf-and-turf bacchanal,
complete with pay-per-view boxing). In the book's epilogue, when Frey ticks off a terse update on everyone, you can almost
hear the Jim Carroll Band's brutal survivor's lament "People Who Died" kicking in on the soundtrack of the inevitable film
adaptation.
The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I
am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the
surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under
Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph
breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut.
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