Book Review: A Million Little Pieces

I was disheartened when both of my book clubs chose James Frey's A Million Little Pieces for their February selection. After the whole Oprah brouhaha, I had no desire to read it, and I really didn't want to pay money for it.

At this point, it's impossible to review the book without addressing the controversy surrounding it. For the record, here's my position: Memoirs are supposed to be factual. As memoirist Mary Karr has written, "[Frey] keeps saying there's a great debate about fact and fiction in memoirs. But the only debate is in his mind. It's not really that hard; you just don't make stuff up." Frey has not merely changed names; he has invented incidents and altered the facts in ways that are important to the narrative.

People have argued that the truth of the story doesn't really matter as long as the story resonates with readers. On one hand, I definitely believe in the power of fiction, and I agree that stories can have a symbolic truth that transcends their fictionality. Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet are all fictional, but their stories have resonated with generations of people. But a memoir is different. A memoir is supposed to be true. Frey went on TV and discussed his book not as a novelist talking about characters, but as the protagonist of his own story. Part of the reason it was published is because Frey was seen as a person with an extreme story. His identity as a survivor telling a true story was a crucial part of the package.

Molly Friedrich, agent to Frank McCourt, says, "Not to be too horribly cynical, but isn't it a lot easier to get on the nonfiction best-seller list than the fiction list? Hello!" As a novelist who is trying to get published, I think that Frey should have called his book fiction and gotten in line with the rest of us who are trying to publish a first novel.

(And I'll pause here to say that I consider "unreal reality" to be a larger problem than simply this memoir; "reality television," for example, purports to be unscripted, but those shows employ writers who revise and manipulate the story lines. Our culture has a fascination with "reality," but we still want it to follow predictable patterns, and often the "reality" is every bit as mediated as the fiction.)

In memoirs, truth matters. Hillary Frey (no relation to James) wrote in her review of A Million Little Pieces in Salon last year, "too often the horror of his reality is made unreal by his posturing, by his aggressive toughness, by the monotonous rhythm of the way he writes. If Frey's story is powerful at all it's for the facts -- the sickness, the hurt, the fatigue of withdrawal -- not for his rendition of them....His story might be shocking, but it isn't art." And now the facts are in question.

And what do I make of the story? I went into it horribly prejudiced, so I was surprised to find myself liking parts of it. Yes, Frey has a monotonous style, but it was straightforward, and I prefer a direct style to one that's pretentious. The repetitive syntax matched the story of a man who was desperately trying to make sense of his life. Parts of the book--Frey's confrontation with his parents, his meetings with his girlfriend--were genuinely moving. He repeatedly describes pain and vomit, which is stomach-churning, but I didn't doubt that the focus on the body and its discomforts would be a big part of rehab. The lack of quotation marks and traditional paragraphing didn't bother me; it seemed to fit with a character whose life is still jumbled.

As I read, though, I kept thinking, "I wonder if this is true?" I tried to remember what I had read on web sites and in the newspaper--did his girlfriend really commit suicide? Did he really have a root canal without anesthesia?

Paradoxically, fiction can have greater credibility than fact-challenged memoir, because we accept its fictionality and suspend our disbelief; if we doubt what we're reading, it's a sign that the writer has gone wrong somewhere. With Frey's fiction-nonfiction hybrid, we don't know where we stand. And Frey, unlike some postmodern writers, doesn't use a mixture of truth and fiction to call our attention to the writing process itself, or make us question our desire for a linear narrative or integrated characters. He's not experimenting, or playing with conventions; he's simply lying.

Frey writes, "I have faced the reality and the reality is simple. I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal. That is what I am and who I am and that is how I should be remembered. No happy lies, no invented memories, no fake sentimentality, no tears. I do not deserve tears. I deserve to be portrayed honestly...." I agree. I wish he had been able to do so.

A Million Little Pieces purports to be the story of a man who has overcome addiction by fearlessly facing the truth. Frey makes much of his own refusal to believe in a higher power, and he rejects the 12 Steps of AA in order to forge his own path to recovery. Based on the values Frey claims to hold, then, this book is a failure.