I loved A Million Little Pieces but I didn’t read it on recommendation. I picked it up at Borders and read a few paragraphs here and there, what I used to do before Amazon, and bought it based on liking those paragraphs. So it’s not such a surprise that I liked it. People who bought it based on recommendations are a little more split on the issue. Some loved it, as they’d been told they would. Others were pissed off.
I found it compelling. Yes, the refusal to follow modern literary conventions was distracting at best and pretentious at worst. But it’s a long book and you learn to ignore the odd formatting and the needlessly capitalized nouns, the same way you do when reading Dickens or Trolloppe.
The choppy sentences, sentence fragments, and repetitions I was OK with. They mirrored the way his brain was working at the time. It’s true that entire themes and paragraphs get repeated at times and that those parts do get a little boring, but even that is understandable. I’m sure a person going through rehab does keep returning to the same themes over and over.
But I have to agree with the people who don’t believe it’s non-fiction. It’s fictionalized non-fiction at the least. Some of the fictionalizations aren’t too egregious. Like his avoidance of his own eyes leading up to the final stunning look as he rejects alcohol for the first time after rehab – a little overdone but “deep” and harmless. That’s poetic license. I can understand.
But other stuff – his heroic rescue of Lilly, the secret “angels” who make all his real world problems tidily disappear, the gold-hearted mobster who adopts him – it’s all a bit too Hollywood. A nice climax. Everyone buys into his way of thinking: you were right all along, James. He gets sent on his way. The hero, the renegade, the one who’s going to make it on his own. It’s not believable and it’s not even well-written. Frey does a much better job with misery and pain than he does with tender reconciliations and happy endings.
But the thing that bugged me most about this book is that we didn’t get to hear the story behind the guy with no arms. Now, if the book isn’t real at all, he would have made up a good no-armed man story, right? I wish he had.
I loved the book, complaints aside. I started reading it as soon as I got it home from the store and didn’t stop, if I didn’t have to, until I was done. So I’m recommending it, but take it with a grain of salt.
P.S. If you do prefer Hollywood happy endings, you might not want to read the last page that tells you where everybody is now.