Frey Gone Awry by Anne Quinn

I am obsessed with James Frey.  I am obsessed with the man and also with the media frenzy he has provoked.  I have watched Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper on CNN, and I taped James Frey on the Oprah Show so that I could retraumatize myself at will by watching James sink like a stone in front of millions.  I have sat through Scarborough Country, Greta Van Sustern and Rita Cosby.  I have dogged the CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox nightly news programs waiting for a snippet of the continuing saga of the Frey memoir gone sour.

James Frey kept me, like Oprah Winfrey, up for two straight nights. Quite an accomplishment for any man.  His best selling book, A Million Little Pieces is raw and compelling, something like J.D. Salinger meets Frank McCourt.  He is a terrific storyteller and his portrayal of the alcohol and cocaine addiction that pastes the book together is raw and real. The down side lies in the fact that James Frey is a completely untreated alcoholic and drug addict. While he did go through chemical dependency treatment, that is  more or less the kick off to the big game. James didn't suit up for the game. He left the six-week program at Hazelden, and has been white knuckling it ever since.    

There is a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous. " If you take a drunken horse thief and bring him(or her) into AA, you're left with a horse thief." James Frey is suffering from horse thiefism, evidenced by the fact that he has heaped lies upon lies when it would have been just as easy to tell the truth.  Simply put, James Frey created himself, in A Million Little Pieces, as the man he wishes he were.  The white, upper middle class, mid western Frat boy from an intact family, whose parents gladly footed the bill at Hazelden, is hardly the loner, maverick , feisty young man dedicated to the truth and willing to go to any lengths to pursue it.  He's just a scared kid, who wrote a good book that caught on and then caught him in the tangled web he and his untreated addicition wove.

Having worked in the chemical dependency field for over 25 years, I can say in complete confidence that alcoholism and drug addiction is the disease of self-destruction.  Drug addicts and alcoholics aren't afraid they might die; they're afraid they might not.  To live is to suffer and to cause suffering to everyone and everything they touch.  James Frey made it.  He wrote a good book and Oprah chose it for her book club, which is every writer's birthday wish when they blow out their candles.  He made huge amounts of money, bought an apartment in New York City, married and had a child.  He signed a three-book contract and a movie deal.  Of course he had to mess it up.  His alcoholism and drug addiction had the last word.  No, James, you can't just "hang on."  You do have to do it by yourself, but you don't have to do it alone.  The twelve steps show alcoholics and drug addicts the way out of their self-destructiveness.  James Frey's unwillingness to face the demons that have dogged him his entire life caused his public shaming and humiliation.  My hope and prayer for him is that the pain of this experience will drive him into real recovery and he can write a book about that.  The truth is always stranger and more compelling than fiction.

Now, about the media feeding frenzy.  Our public officials lie to us continuously ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman")  and the country appears to have gone numb to that.  Reality TV shows are not real, they're scripted.  People just pretend they're real and watch them anyway. We kill people who kill people to teach people not to kill people.  Nothing incongruous about that.  Our precious environment is being destroyed as we enjoy the warmest January on record and we collectively close our five senses to that.  Yet this young man writes a book which is very loosely based on the truth and the country goes wild. 

James Frey brought to our sleeping minds how awful it feels to be lied to by someone you felt sure was telling the truth.  How terrible if feels to get had. Oprah brought this point home to all of us. She helped someone in a huge way..the problem was the man she helped couldn't help himself.  We are reminded yet again that "the truth always comes out in the wash" as my Norwegian grandmother used to say. Thank you for that, James.  You can count on the truth to not only set you free, but to make you grateful that you
are.

Go back to Blogs.