A Million Little Pieces - James Frey [207]
“At once devastatingly bleak and heartbreakingly hopeful…. Frey somehow manages to make his step-by-step walk through recovery compelling.”
—Charlotte Observer
“A stark, direct and graphic documentation of the rehabilitation process…. The strength of the book comes from the truth of the experience.”
—The Oregonian
“A virtual addiction itself, viscerally affecting…. Compulsively readable.”
—City Paper (Washington, DC)
“Powerful… haunting… addictive…. A beautiful story of recovery and reconciliation.”
—Iowa City Press-Citizen
“An exhilarating read…. Frey’s intense, punchy prose renders his experiences with electrifying immediacy.”
—Time Out New York
“Describes the hopelessness and the inability to stop with precision…. As anyone who has ever spent time in a rehab can testify… he gets that down too.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Frey comes on like the world’s first recovering-addict hero…. [His]criticism of the twelve-step philosophy is provocative and his story undeniably compelling.”
—GQ
“[A] gruesomely absorbing account, told in stripped-down, staccato prose.”
—Details
“Frey has devised a rolling, pulsating style that really moves …undeniably striking…. A fierce and honorable work that refuses to glamorize [the] author’s addiction or his thorny personality…. A book that makes other recovery memoirs look, well, a little pussy-ass.”
—Salon
The author is particularly grateful to the Chinese classic Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu, who is believed to have lived in the 6th century BC. I have read many translations of this ancient text, but Stephen Mitchell’s, published by HarperCollins in 1988, is by far the best. I have made a few minor changes in the passages I’ve quoted with Stephen Mitchell’s permission.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2004
Copyright © 2003 by James Frey
This book is a combination of facts about james Frey's life and certain embellishments. Names, dates, places, events and details have been changed, invented and altered for literary effect. The reader should not consider this book anything other than a work of literature.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese / Doubleday edition as follows:
Frey, James, 1969–
A million little pieces / James Frey.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Frey, James, 1969– 2. Narcotic addicts—Rehabilitation—Minnesota. 3. Narcotic addicts—Minnesota—Biography. I. Title.
HV5831.M6F74 2003
362.29'092—dc21
2002044393
Interior art by Terry Karydes
www.anchorbooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-4000-7901-8
v3.0_r1
A Million Little Pieces is about my memories of my time in a drug and alcohol treatment center. As has been accurately revealed by two journalists at an Internet Web site, and subsequently acknowledged by me, during the process of writing the book, I embellished many details about my past experiences, and altered others in order to serve what I felt was the greater purpose of the book. I sincerely apologize to those readers who have been disappointed by my actions.
I first sat down to write the book in the spring of 1997. I wrote what is now the first forty pages of it. I stopped because I didn’t feel ready to continue to do it, didn’t think I was ready to express some of the trauma I had experienced. I started again in the fall of 2000. I had been working in the film industry and was deeply unsatisfied with what I was doing. I had wanted to write books and was writing films. I saved enough money to give myself eighteen months to write the book.
I didn’t initially think of what I was writing as nonfiction or fiction, memoir or autobiography. I wanted to use my experiences to tell my story about addiction and alcoholism, about recovery, about