The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days" if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on:
I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.
Kelly Krisler, a graduate student,
Simply put, I really liked "A Million Little Pieces." I agree with the review comparisons to "Nightmares Echo," "Running With Scissors," and of course "My Fractured Life." I also would include "Less Than Zero" among the favorable comparisons. Although a fiction novel in comparison to "A Million Little Pieces" being a memoir, "Less Than Zero" deals with the same situations of poor little rich boy becoming an addict not because of life on the mean streets, but simply because he has the money to waste. In terms of impact though, it is hard to top "Nightmares Echo" or "Basketball Diaries." Whereas, it in terms of an addictive reading experience it is hard to top "My Fractured Life" and "Running With Scissors".
In all cases, "A Million Little Pieces" deserving belongs among all the aforementioned. It is graphic and impacting and at the same time addictive to read. A gripping journey that will put knots in your stomach.
http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/m/million-little-pieces.shtml
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