A Million Little Pieces

Crack addict

Imagine waking up on a plane. You have no idea where you have been or where you are going, you have no memory of the preceding two weeks. Imagine that your front four teeth have been knocked out, your nose is broken, and there is a gash on your cheek. Imagine that you have no wallet, no money, no job. Imagine the police in three states are looking for you. Imagine that you have been an alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three. What would you do? What would you do?

Residential treatment center

When he entered a residential treatment center at the age of twenty-three, James Frey had destroyed his body and his mind almost beyond repair. Frey faced a stark choice: accept that he wasn't going to see twenty-four or step into the fallout of his smoking wreck of a life and take drastic action. Surrounded by patients as troubled as he - including a judge, a mobster, a former world-champion boxer, and a fragile former prostitute - and a droning dogma of How to Recover, James Frey had to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he had lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he holds.

James Frey

For as long as he can remember, James Frey has had within him something that he calls "the Fury," a bottomless source of anger and rage that he has kept at bay since he was 10 by obliterating his consciousness with alcohol and drugs (Publishers Weekly). A Million Little Pieces is an uncommonly genuine account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed.

Short sentences

Frey survived and his book is a bestseller. James Frey writes in short sentences. Nearly a decade after his miraculous rebound, James Frey, has birthed a poetic and much ballyhooed account of his recovery. A Million Little Pieces is a stark disturbing account, one rife with raw emotion, with rage and sadness and utter despair. And vomiting, copious vomiting. Acute addiction, he makes abundantly clear, is sheer agony, unrelenting, merciless, cruel agony. Detox, it turns out, is no picnic, either, but in the end it helped save Frey's life.

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
ISBN: 0307276902