Books: A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey

Pace Smoking Gun, controversy be damned, and as embarrassed as I am to have read a paperback with an Oprah's Book Club sticker pasted on the front cover, this is a damned good book. Ashamed nevertheless, I read it in the safety of my home - a copy found in my building's laundry room - because I wouldn't want to be seen with it in public after the brouhaha a few years ago. The irony in my fear of being judged is that far more people probably judge me by what I'm wearing and maybe the fact that I'm reading a book than by what book I actually am reading. But the people whose judgements might matter know. Unless you see what book I'm reading and you are about to judge me by what book I'm reading, I couldn't give a rat's ass about your judgement. That's pretty twisted, huh?

I had, I think, an extremely valid reason (i.e. excuse) for reading this book. As I've said before, I write (wrote?) semi-fictional memoir. I call it that. I actually consider all of my memoir "real," but I call it that - semi-fictional - for the same reason that James Frey ought to have called his the same: the reader machine (reviewers, columnists, Oprah, Larry King (as it turned out for Frey), and last but not least, readers, of course) doesn't discern between memoir and autobiography. I, however, do, and by my personal understanding of memoir, Frey did no wrong. I know (obviously) that "my personal understanding" of a word is meaningless and that words are defined by their uses in common. I can think that "cat" means what others call "dog," but it's moot until I can communicate dogness with the word "cat" to a group of other speakers. It is with resignation to this fact, then, that memoir is now a synonym for autobiography that I call my writing and his semi-fictional memoir, which seems redundant to me, but won't be to anyone else.

My understanding of memoir encompasses a retelling of and reflection upon one's memories. Memories are not facts. People mis-remember things constantly (hello, Scooter Libby trial). Sometimes people pretend to mis-remember things (hello, Scooter Libby trial) and they lie about it under oath and then the reader machine gets mad because the reader machine feels foolish for having been duped. But memoir is not the grand jury, affidavits, depositions. What happens in my head - only in my head - dreams I have at night, fantasies I have during the day, stories that I am told by others which may or may not be 10 or 50 or 100% true - is all equally valid, in my head, as things that actually happened (I sat at a desk all day). Because in reality I didn't just sit at a desk all day. My consciousness was where ever else it went. Traipsing across the Steppe with a grandmother I never really met - photo documentation to the contrary aside.

It seems as though I'm making a dangerous argument for the total subjectivity of reality, and I'm not - whether I believe that or not - and I don't (although there is something to be said for the existence of different layers of reality; I've not schematized it and I refuse to do so) - but in literature, we write what we write; what inspires us to write is real, and what we write becomes real while we write it and while it's read. The young author portrayed in You Can't Go Home Again committed the opposite sin of Frey - he wrote what he called a novel, based on the characters and essence of his hometown. People recognized portraits of themselves and their neighbors and became enraged, sent nasty notes and death threats to his apartment. Reviewers and columnists criticized him for drawing too closely on his personal life. Perhaps if he had called it a memoir, the reader machine would have let him off the hook. But his book, Frey's books, and my books (um, I don't have any books yet, but yeah) are NOT Bob Woodward books. They are about us and our experiences with the people we interact with and the things that happen inside our skulls. Henry Miller wrote. . . what? Novels? Memoir? Something half-way between? Bingo. Semi-fictional memoir.

Frey's book is potently honest in transcribing the inner workings of a certain sort of psychology. I can say this and know it's true because I know a Frey-like person very well. I thought of him all weekend while I read A Million Little Pieces; I felt like he had written the book, rather than this James Frey person. The undiagnosed pain that causes what Frey calls the Fury - the passionate, enraged, all-encompassing drive that comes over the book's narrator, inspiring violence, self-loathing, self-destruction, substance abuse, etc. - is a fury that I have seen again and again in this person that I know, and it is that fury that has repeatedly ended our relationship - this time for the last time, I'm certain, despite his calls last night. It's time for me to let go of him because, unlike Frey/Frey's narrator, this person is not working on controlling the fury. He is still making excuses for himself, blaming others, and manipulating. I told him to go to therapy, or to at least try yoga or meditation. We were on the phone, but if we'd been speaking in person, he would have spit in my face. I think instead he hung up on me.*

The psychology I am referring to is one most often seen in teenagers - even I, demure as I am, expressed it a bit toward the end of high school - and it therefore comes off as young. The book's descriptions come off as young; there is an intensity in the content, but also in the clipped styling of phrases - direct, spare melodrama - that recalls the anguish and drama of high school and college. I don't doubt that older people think and write like this (many of them in far grosser terms even less evolved), but still, the effect is that of youth. And in the vulnerability (Frey calls himself a sheep in wolf's clothing) lies the empathy, and in the vulnerability that inspires melodrama (Look at me, world, I'm important! World, I'm in pain; I suffer! World, look! Look at my pain and look at me!) lies the empathy. The very fact that Frey worsened his narrator's fate (a longer prison stint than his own seems to be the main issue the reader machine attached) enacts this sheep in wolf's clothing vulnerability, which demands attention at all costs, even the self. It's young, but it's real, and it's valid.

*Update: While I was writing this post, he sent another text message: "I am super sorry. Have a nice life. I am going to clean up." The problem is that his behavior forms a repeating cycle: apologize and promise to be good; actually be good; fuck up; rage and deny having done anything wrong; repeat. I've been through this more than three times with him now, and I'm done. I am tender to a point, malleable even, but I will not be manipulated and abused.