It is probably completely impossible, at this moment in time, for anyone to write a review of A Million Little Pieces and not mention Oprah’s “I’m disappointed in you” scandal, so I’ll just jump straight to the inevitable. When that whole he-fictionalized-some-events-in-his-memoir news first broke, I thought, “so what?” A memoir is, at bottom, a work of literature, not history, and I’ll lay money on the fact that every single memoir of all time has fudged some details—names, dates, timing, 20-20 hindsight—in order to create a pleasing narrative arc. No one wants to read a laundry list of facts, let alone a completely honest version of events—how good would a memoir be if it didn’t occasionally withhold information for the sake of tension? (Terrible, in case you’re not familiar with the concept of rhetorical questions.)
But then I read the book, and then I read the accusations, and I realized this isn’t just withholding a few names and dates here and there, or even reversing the order of events to keep a story logical: this is wholesale untruth. No wonder Oprah was disappointed; I was too. He fabricated major chunks of the story—hitting a cop with his car, nearly killing a priest, actively dealing drugs and skipping classes in college, instead of graduating on time and with honors. In essence, he turned the fairly bland story of a fairly average suburban kid, high on weed and occasional underage drinking, into a sensational tale of what has got to be one of the worst drug habits, not to mention the worst past, morally-speaking, of all time. (A list of his crimes could, and, according to him, extend past twenty-one pages. And that’s excepting the priest he beat unconscious.) This isn’t just turning 1971 into 1973; it’s turning Mick Jagger into the Devil himself, and it’s a complete and total lie.
All right. But what about the book’s intrinsic merits? Is it worth all this lying? As for me, I doubt it. Oprah called it “gut-wrenching,” “raw,” and “real” and said that it kept her awake at night. It had the same effect on me, at least the “awake at night” bit; however, I think that’s more on the rubbernecking principle than real literary merit: it’s really, really hard to turn your head away from a particularly gruesome train wreck, and the protagonist’s life (I hesitate to actually call it “Frey’s life”) is a train wreck if I’ve ever seen one. You keep turning pages just to discover how badly he’s going to screw up on the next page.
I don’t think I really learned anything particularly deep from the book; in fact, I think the protagonist’s stubborn insistence that there is no God and that he alone is responsible for his addictions, while a nice thought for those of us not a regular crack user, could do more harm than good among the millions of alcoholics who have found AA helpful. As for literary merit/writing style/all those pretentious reasons for reading, his prose was passable if not totally enchanting. I found his Habit of randomly capitalizing certain Letters irritating in the extreme, but otherwise the prose didn’t distract from the real story, and kept it flowing nicely, with plenty of swear words to make you believe that this guy’s hardcore, man, a real Alcoholic, Addict, and Criminal. Nothing like an F-bomb or two to get the reader’s respect and attention; maybe he should have sworn at Oprah for her forgiveness. It’d be raw. It’d be real. It’d probably keep her up at night. What do you say, Frey?
No comments:
Post a Comment