Oprah's book flub

Her latest pick -- James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" -- is bad news for her viewers and her show.

By Hillary Frey

Oct 11, 2005 | Late last month, Oprah announced a major change in her influential book club. Leaving behind the classics of Tolstoy, McCullers and Faulkner, she's once again focusing on work by living authors. This time around, however, featured titles won't necessarily be novels. Memoir, biography, history -- they're all fair game now. In the same breath, Oprah alerted fans to her first selection for the club's newest incarnation: James Frey's 2003 recovery memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."

At first glance, Frey's book seems like a fine pick. Although it's a memoir, it shares with many of Oprah's fictional picks an overwhelming message of triumph; the underdog has beaten the odds and come out on top. In "A Million Little Pieces," the then-23-year-old upper-middle-class kid Frey (who shares my father's name but is no relation) goes into rehab, where he kicks his addiction to almost everything: coke, crack, alcohol, glue -- you name it. Rejecting the 12 steps, Frey relies on little more than the "Tao Te Ching" for support. His portrait of withdrawal is graphic and ugly; at one point, he undergoes two root canals without anesthesia (no drugs for addicts, after all), and he generally spends a lot of time retching into the john. But Frey's is a success story -- he gets clean and, judging from his follow-up memoir, "My Friend Leonard," stays that way.

Yet, Frey's book is a peculiar choice. The advantage to featuring books by living writers is pretty basic: Wally Lamb, Anita Shreve and Janet Fitch -- unlike, say, Faulkner -- are all available to go on to "Oprah" to discuss their work. And the point of talking about fiction is to learn about the craft, to think deeply about the way a story unfolds, and to recall and share that unique sublime emotion that comes only with investing oneself -- heart and mind -- in something that is not true. A novelist might appear on "Oprah" and have a conversation over dinner, with Oprah and a few viewers; the writer will answer questions about characters and all the imaginative choices that go into dreaming up a plot. But when Frey is a guest on "Oprah" later this month, how will that work?

Frey is the author and main character of his book, and the plot of "A Million Little Pieces" is his actual life. A discussion of Frey's work, then, amounts to a discussion of James Frey. On the show -- and in their own homes, as they finish their weekly assignments -- book clubbers will pick apart the causes of Frey's addiction and analyze his parents and what they may or may not have done to contribute to his problems. (And you do get the sense, reading the book, that Frey is very, very angry with his parents, even as he doesn't outright blame them for his turn to drugs. Note: They pay for his rehab.) Readers will dissect the "rage" Frey carries like an old blanket throughout his book. Oprah's fans -- who have become careful, close readers of literature -- will in the end rely on their skills in pop psychology as they try to make something of this memoir.

In other words, the conversation with, or about, James Frey will likely not be about creation, or books or literature, but about destruction -- of Frey's and his friends' and family members' lives. There is something inherently creepy about a million-odd people discussing -- over a series of weeks, online and at home -- how and why James Frey became a drug addict. And there is something frustrating in that these debates will take place under the guise of a discussion about a piece of writing.

But "A Million Little Pieces" isn't a poor choice for the most successful book club in the world solely because scrutinizing it amounts only to picking apart its author. To put it plain, this book just isn't that good. In 2003, just before "A Million Little Pieces" was first published, Frey gave a manic interview to the New York Observer during which he exclaimed, "I'm going to try to write the best book of my generation and I'm going to try to be the best writer." Well, he's not even close.

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