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A Million Little Pieces (Oprah Book Club #54)
by James Frey

A Million Little Pieces (Oprah Book Club #54) Cover

About This Book

ISBN13: 9780307276902
ISBN10: 0307276902
Condition: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Intense, unpredictable, and instantly engaging, A Million Little Pieces is a story of drug and alcohol abuse and rehabilitation as it has never been told before. Recounted in visceral, kinetic prose, and crafted with a forthrightness that rejects piety, cynicism, and self-pity, it brings us face-to-face with a provocative new understanding of the nature of addiction and the meaning of recovery.

By the time he entered a drug and alcohol treatment facility, James Frey had taken his addictions to near-deadly extremes. He had so thoroughly ravaged his body that the facility's doctors were shocked he was still alive. The ensuing torments of detoxification and withdrawal, and the never-ending urge to use chemicals, are captured with a vitality and directness that recalls the seminal eye-opening power of William Burroughs's Junky.

But A Million Little Pieces refuses to fit any mold of drug literature. Inside the clinic, James is surrounded by patients as troubled as he is — including a judge, a mobster, a one-time world-champion boxer, and a fragile former prostitute to whom he is not allowed to speak about their friendship and advice strikes James as stronger and truer than the clinic's droning dogma of How to Recover. James refuses to consider himself a victim of anything but his own bad decisions, and insists on accepting sole accountability for the person he has been and the person he may become — which runs directly counter to his counselors' recipes for recovery.

James has to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he has lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he holds. It is this fight, told with the charismatic energy and power of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, that is at the heart of A Million Little Pieces: the fight between one young man's will and the ever-tempting chemical trip to oblivion, the fight to survive on his own terms, for reasons close to his own heart.

A Million Little Pieces is an uncommonly genuine account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed. It is also the introduction of a bold and talented literary voice.

Review:

"A Million Little Pieces is as intense and perfectly detailed an account of a human quitting his drug and alcohol dependency as you are likely to read. And James Frey is horribly honest and funny in a young-guard Eggers and Wallace sort of way, but perhaps more contained and measured. He is unerring in his descent into a world where the characters need help in such extremely desperate ways. Read this immediately.? Gus Van Sant

Review:

"A Million Little Pieces is this generation's most comprehensive book about addiction: a heartbreaking memoir defined by its youthful tone and poetic honesty. Beneath the brutality of James Frey?s painful process of growing up, there are simple gestures of kindness that will reduce even the most jaded to tears. Very few books earn those tears — this one does. It will have you sobbing, laughing, angry, frustrated, and most importantly, hopeful. A Million Little Pieces is inspirational and essential. A remarkable performance." Bret Easton Ellis

Review:

"Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics...that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits. Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"James Frey has written the War and Peace of addiction. It lends new meaning to the word 'harrowing' and one sometimes shudders to read it. But deep down, beneath all the layers and the masks, there lives something unconquerable in Frey's hurt spirit...And the writing, the writing, the writing." Pat Conroy

Review:

"One of the most compelling books of the year... Incredibly bold... Somehow accomplishes what three decades' worth of cheesy public service announcements and after-school specials have failed to do: depict hard-core drug addiction as the self-inflicted apocalypse that it is." The New York Post

Review:

"Frey has devised a rolling, pulsating style that really moves... undeniably striking.... A fierce and honorable work that refuses to glamorize [the] author's addiction or his thorny personality.... A book that makes other recovery memoirs look, well, a little pussy-ass." Salon

Review:

"Frey proffers a book that is deeply flawed, too long, a trial of even the most naive reader's credulousness — yet its posturings hit a nerve....The prose is repetitive to the point of being exasperating, but the story, with its forays into the consciousness of an addict, is correspondingly difficult to put down." Publishers Weekly

Review:

"Again and again, the book delivers recollections that leave the reader winded and unsteady. James Frey's staggering recovery memoir could well be seen as the final word on the topic." San Francisco Chronicle

Review:

"Gripping... A great story... You can't help but cheer his victory." Los Angeles Times Book Review

Review:

"Insistent as it is demanding.... A story that cuts to the nerve of addiction by clank-clank-clanking through the skull of the addicted... A critical milestone in modern literature." Orlando Weekly

Review:

"Incredible... Mesmerizing... Heart-rending." Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Review:

"A brutal, beautifully written memoir." The Denver Post

Review:

"The most lacerating tale of drug addiction since William S. Burroughs' Junky." The Boston Globe

Synopsis:

At the age of twenty-three, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his four front teeth had been knocked out. His nose was broken and there was a hole through his cheek. He had no idea where the plane was headed or what had happened over the preceding two weeks. He had been an alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three. When he checked into a treatment facility shortly thereafter, he was told he could either stop using or die before he reached twenty-four.

A Million Little Pieces is Frey's acclaimed account of his six weeks in rehab; fiercely honest and deeply affecting, it is one of the most graphic and immediate books ever to be written about addiction and recovery.

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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 8 comments:
Carol Green, June 17, 2008 (view all comments by Carol Green)
I can see why you would feel betrayed to read a non-fiction book and then find out it wasn't actually true. However, if you read this book knowing that it's fiction, it's still a really powerful, well-written book. I highly recommend it.
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acid42, October 8, 2007 (view all comments by acid42)
It’s written in a grim, gritty, often repetitious first-person point-of-view, but delivers a wallop with its valorous attempt at describing what infinite addiction and infinite rage are like, using finite words.
___The story pulls you into the writer’s head– you become James Frey, you feel as he felt, and experience things as he does while reading the book. And it’s a memoir– meaning it’s all true. (SUPPOSEDLY.)
___But it turns out Frey embellished. A lot. Which, you know, is perfectly forgivable because if adding on to the story aids it, then why not? Except for the fact that it’s touted as a non-fiction book. A memoir for goodness’ sake. And for the fact that Frey himself has said numerous times in many interviews that the book is truthful.
___Investigative website The Smoking Gun uncovered proof that Frey made up most of his “Criminal” career to make himself look worse than he really was. Crucial events such as his arrest in Ohio aren’t corroborated by actual records. And well, it turns out Frey was originally shopping this book around as fiction and consequently rejected by publishers numerous times, before some rewrites and a major overhaul into a “memoir” got it into Doubleday.
___The reason why it’s such a betrayal? The appeal of the book is precisely in the reader thinking “this actually happened to someone for real.” Once that thought is over-ridden by copious amounts of embellishment, it loses its zest.
___And yet. If simply for the psychological hurdles and the way Frey wrote of the addiction he was dealing with, the book still possesses a power all its own. Of course that’s if you can get past the lies.
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mikeydoc, August 21, 2007 (view all comments by mikeydoc)
Well it looks like he fooled everyone,all the experts,suffering addiction is quite bad enough without lying about it, just ask anyone who is in a healthy recovery and program of self improvement and spiritual enlightenment!!
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780307276902
Author:
Frey, James
Publisher:
Anchor Books
Subject:
Non-Classifiable
Subject:
Minnesota
Subject:
Rehabilitation
Subject:
Substance Abuse & Addictions - General
Subject:
Personal Memoirs
Subject:
Specific Groups - General
Copyright:
2003
Edition Description:
Paperback
Series:
Oprah's Book Club
Publication Date:
September 2005
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
430
Dimensions:
802x524x97 69
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