Ilph wrote:captainjoe wrote:Just finished this:
My girlfriend's reading this too.
Let me know what she thinks, I thought it was fantastic. I am not one that sheds tears over things that I read, but I got all teary eyed a couple of times reading this.
Here is a synopsis for anyone who cares:
FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Prodigiously talented, poetic, unflinchingly honest, and relentlessly present. A lot to live up to? Not if you're James Frey, whose memoir Pat Conroy calls "the War and Peace of addiction." As Frey will unapologetically assert, he's an Alcoholic and a Drug Dealer and a Criminal (caps his). When we meet him, he has finally hit rock bottom after a long descent into the swirling vortex of addiction, which he narrates with an in-your-face immediacy.
In rehab, Frey contemplates suicide, imagining "the happy lies" that will replace the truth in his obituary -- the fabricated transformation from reckless crackhead to "helpless martyr." But Frey's refusal to accept a conjured reality becomes his road to salvation: for if he alone is responsible for his condition and recovery, there's nobody else to blame.
Frey's stint in rehab is just two months long, but in that short time he learns that to trust himself, he must learn to trust others. He meets a shady underworld boss, a judge learning to hold himself to the standards he sets for others, a tragically beautiful crack whore, and a dangerous bully with demons worse than addiction. Despite the darkness that shadows them all as they struggle back to life, Frey withholds judgment of all but himself and embraces the purest form of personal responsibility. In doing so, he fights his way free. (Spring 2003 Selection)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"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?" 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. He 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, 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. A Million Little Pieces is an uncommonly genuine account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed.
SYNOPSIS
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“The most lacerating tale of drug addiction since William S. Burroughs’ Junky.” —The Boston Globe
The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of A Million Little Pieces, James Frey’s furious and inspired memoir of addiction and recovery.
