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Book Reviews
» BY KATE SPARKS
A Million Little Pieces
By James Frey
THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE IS RIPE WITH
ugliness—pride, greed, shame, anger, dependency,
addiction. Waking up to our potential
for goodness also means seeing the darkness
of which we are capable. Never has someone so keenly
conveyed these dark emotions as does James Frey in A
Million Little Pieces. If the title alone sends chills down
your spine, you may know the feeling of being broken.
The feeling that nothing can put together again the many
pieces of your broken life.
The book has been said to be the final word on the
topic of addiction. It is the memoir of Frey, who, at age
23 wakes up on a plane with a broken nose, a hole in his
cheek large enough for two fingers, and no memory of
the last two weeks, nor any clue about where the plane is
headed. He has been an alcoholic for 10 years and a crack
addict for three. The book recounts Frey’s six weeks in a
treatment center in Minnesota, his struggle to find a working
philosophy to keep him sober, and the friends he relies
on in the process.
Frey’s language is raw, candid and poetic at times. He
doesn’t follow traditional rules of grammar, neglecting to
use commas where they don’t fit the flow of his enraged
mind and capitalizing random words to signify their importance.
His conversational and readable style makes you
feel like you’re sitting right next to him as he tells his tale.
Simple and real, he immediately wins over the reader.
Frey checks into the best treatment center around at
the time, which still had just a 15 percent recovery rate.
As you might guess, the 12-step program is the central
component to the recovery efforts of the clinic and staff.
Frey is stubborn, angry, and intelligent. He isn’t about to
accept the twelve steps, the concept of powerlessness, or
God. Yet, he’s told he will die if he drinks or uses even one
more time. Mornings of vomiting bile, blood and chunks
of stomach warn of the same fate.
As his days at the center go by, Frey begins to imagine
a life without drugs and alcohol. Still, he won’t concede to
the 12-step philosophy. As it often happens when we are
broken, Frey finds himself at the beginning of a spiritual
journey, though not one that meets with the clinic’s views.
As he sits on an empty bench outside the clinic one afternoon,
he thinks, “I am opening to myself. I don’t know
what I am opening myself to. Is it God or something
Higher. Is it me or what is around me. Does it matter do
If you would like to
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I need to know. It matters because it is what is keeping
me together. This opening is allowing me to pick up the
pieces of a shattered life. I need to believe in it to continue
to believe in me. I need to know what it is. What is it that
opens me.
“I stand and I walk along the edge of the water until
it ends in a Sea of yellow grass. The grass is dead now but
will return in the Spring that is the way of the World.
Things die and they return. Is that biology or God or
something Higher. Are we biology or God or something
Higher. I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat
is biology, but what is the song. Will this song exist when
MINDCHATTER December 2005
11