A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

Yes, I'm a little late to this. I would have never read it all if I hadn't seen it in a used bookstore for $2.00 (my cut-off purchase point for any book). Of course I had read all the articles about the controversy, had seen the clip from Oprah. What never came up in all those discussions is that this isn't a very well written book. It's not poorly written, but there is a lot of repetition, a lot of being inside the author's head as he repeats the same thoughts again and again.  Intended to give a glimpse into the mind of an addict, it gets tiresome 100 pages in. All the characters talk the same, sound the same. Addicts offer words of wisdom in long, rambling bursts. The author finds redemption in a good girl living a bad life, guidance from a Mafioso with a good heart.

If this were a real memoir, you could defend all of this under the banner of  'it really happened'. Fiction doesn't get the same pass as memoir and non-fiction does - you can be sloppy and sentimental in a memoir, you can have clunky sentences and poorly constructed paragraphs and characters that act as pure plot devices, because it all happened. In fiction, you can't. Well, you can, but don't expect to be taken seriously.

There are some interesting parts about addiction and recovery, but if you want that you can watch Intervention or read the parts about AA meetings in Infinite Jest. The dental surgery scene is toe curling, and the main character does seem utterly irredeemable and unlikable, so the fact that people cheer on his recovery is a testament to the author's talent. But,you know at the end of the book he is going to make it, on his terms, his way. I almost expected a scene at the end where he walks across a football field and fist pumps the air.

I've never taken to memoirs. I prefer fiction, even thinly veiled fiction, but if I'm going to read about someone's life, I prefer autobiography and biography before memoir.  I didn't really see what the big fuss was about - of course he fudged some of this. It's a book.  Even realism isn't real - it's a version of real, an edited, crafted version that has a identifiable elements (plot, characters, motivations, etc) the real life often does not. All memoirs have some level of artifice involved - if a memoir recounts a conversation that the author had when he/she was eight years old - it's made up.   It doesn't bother me that he made up some central elements to this book, and it doesn't bother me that he tried to sell it as fiction first but then re-branded it as memoir when he saw where the  money was.  What bothers me is that is that he tried to hide some poor writing under the memoir tag.