a million little pieces
by james frey

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 facilityís 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 Burroughsís 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 ó but their friendship and advice strikes James as stronger and truer than the clinicís 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 manís 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.

no fuckers!

It takes alot of courage to express your feelings he shouldnt feel any remourse at all because it has touched sooo many people includng me.(: ITS NOT right saying half the stuff isnt true...maybe its not but it still takes a whole bunch of courage just to tell people his problem.. who ever think he is a liar.. you r so wrong... wow he lied about a couple of things soo wat i love this book it amazes me he lived through all of that! so who ever says that needs to stop because i would like to c you right a book about your problems! listen to me .... James Frey has alot of guts just putting his problems in a book and showing them to the world..its not right to make funn and try to make him have remourse! so thank you Bye bye Just think before you say.(:

this book was unbelievable. it touched me in so many ways i can't explain. whether parts are embelished or not, it still rings true. brought a couple tears to my eyes..

i wouldn't care so much if he didn't spend so much time preaching about truth....he's a liar and an addict....i hope he can stay clean after all this stress....after all is said and done, i'm disappointed in the book...not because of the scandal, but because i don't think it was life changing or revealing. he had no ability to see into himself, no sense of self reflection, and now it turns out what was there, was mostly untrue. he tried too hard to keep his reader interested with drama like root canals and suicide and missed keeping his audience gripped by the substance of his experience. i can only be left to think that he himself doesn't understand his own experience fully.

Don't believe the hype! Embelished or not I was let down by this book. I did not connect with any of the characters, the pace and method of his recovery was unconvincing and over all the book was a bore.

this book had some pretty gripping moments (the visit to the dentist for example). generally a good read, but I hated the writing style. missing punctuation, strange use of capital letters on nouns in the middle of sentences, and annoying repetition. the controversy about the accuracy of the book doesn't change my opnion of it in any way. he embellished some details and changed some facts. so what. it's still a good book and I don't particularily care if it's 100% true or not.