A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

Clenched-fist prose of a tough guy in drug rehab

Jonathan Gibbs
Tuesday 03 June 2003 00:00 BST
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In the literature of drugs and addiction, many books concern the nature of the drug, and the lifestyle and characters it pushes the user towards. This memoir starts when James Frey enters rehab at the age of 23, somewhere close to self-destruction, and ends when he leaves. We do learn something of his life before, and the drugs he took during the last decade of it (mostly alcohol and crack), but it is primarily about his fight to beat addiction.

When Frey arrives at the clinic (expensive), paid for by his parents (rich, often absent), he has four teeth missing, a hole in his cheek and a broken nose. Two days later, he undergoes double root canal surgery without anaesthetic. He is a tough guy. He gets into fights, reads the Tao te Ching and bonds with some of the other "hardcore" patients. These include a mobster, a judge and Lilly, an ex-prostitute with whom Frey, strictly against the rules, starts a relationship.

Otherwise, Frey sits alone and fights his impulse to "go out and get fucked up". He is the contemporary existentialist hero, an inaction hero. This is a place where merely managing to sit and smoke a cigarette is a feat of extreme courage.

The clinic is run along the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. It claims to be the best in the world, based on a success rate of 17 per cent compared to an average of 15 per cent. "Success" is defined as staying sober for a year after finishing the programme.

Frey has no interest in AA's Twelve Steps or its Higher Power. To him, addiction is a decision, not a disease. On leaving the clinic, he heads straight to a bar and orders a pint of bourbon to see if he is strong enough not to drink it. I would guess that anyone struggling to maintain their life through AA would not be particularly impressed by this stunt.

To anyone who has not been an addict, he offers few insights. His terse, clenched-fist prose avoids metaphor. To say that addiction is wanting "more and more and more and more" is meaningful only if you have been there.

The book's strength is in its narrative drive. Frey draws us into the daily round of coping with authority, trying to keep breakfast down and navigating the cycles of pain and anger towards healing. This blunt style pays off when Frey's parents fly in for group therapy, and they confront their joint failure to be a family. Thereafter, practically every incidence of the word "hug" acts as a trigger for tears - ours as well as the characters'.

For all its power, parts of the book rankle. It has been optioned for filming by Gus Van Sant, and it's hard not to think of the pieties and hugs of Good Will Hunting. Such episodes as Frey's affair with Lilly, his dramatic rescue of her from a crack house or the joyous televised boxing match when Frey's mobster friend has steak and lobster flown in for everyone: these could be pre-written for the screen. They may be true, but they seem varnished to the point of fairy tale.

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