Addict’s memoir: Loathe it or love it

“Sorry for the mess,” first-time author James Frey mutters, picking up empty beer bottles at the friend’s house in Laurel Canyon where he is staying. Traces of leftover food are splayed on the dining table, though the rest of the place looks immaculate. “We had a party last night.” It’s 8:45 on a foggy morning and he’s bright-eyed and attentive. “That’s the nice part about not drinking.” He gestures at the bottles. “Feeling good the next morning.”

Frey is the author of “A Million Little Pieces,” a brutally honest memoir detailing the horrors of his experience in drug and alcohol rehabilitation at age 23, and of the painful struggle toward life when the Alcoholics Anonymous method didn’t work for him. The parties he used to have, one surmises surveying the neat room, didn’t look quite this manageable the next day.

The book opens as he emerges from a blackout to find himself on an airplane. “My four front teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut,” he writes. The night before, he’d taken a face-first dive down a fire escape and ended up in a hospital where a friend had urged his parents to arrange help.

He’d been put on the plane, on his way to a famous rehab center in Minnesota where the narrative takes place. “My clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood,” he recounts. He had no wallet, no ticket, no baggage, no idea where he was or where he was going, only that he’d come to the end of the line.

Now, on a recent morning, Frey sits forward on the white, heavily upholstered couch to show his tattoos. On his right shoulder, there’s a triangle within a circle, a mark often associated with 12-step programs; a series of tick marks, one for each of the nine years he’s been sober, floats above it. Though he doesn’t follow the AA program, that sign, he says, is an ancient Chinese symbol for serenity. “It’s what I aspire to.”

The Taoist emblem for life blossoms in dark ink on his left shoulder, and on his left inner wrist, the letters “s p c d h c” are inscribed. They stand, he explains, for serenity, patience, compassion, discipline, honesty and courage, traits he’s learned from the Tao Te Ching, a book of wisdom written 25 centuries ago by Lao Tsu, which his brother gave him while in rehab. Skeptical at first, Frey says the book has become the road map that helped him gain and hold onto sobriety. “When I read the Tao, it helps me feel better,” he says. “My process is really simple: If I want to do something, I have a decision to make. The decision is either yes or no. Oftentimes, the decision I want to make is yes, but the decision I know I have to make is no. What do I do? If I sit and wait, I know I’ll feel better, and know that saying no will cease to become a decision, it’ll just be something that I can do.”

Meeting the author, now 33, is a startling experience, mostly because he’s not at all what one expects. A certain clamor has preceded the former screenwriter on his book tour, like the rumble of thunder, boisterous and ear-splitting, distinct from the book itself. He’s been portrayed in media across the nation as an arrogant, macho jerk, thanks in part to an early article in which he slammed a number of well-established writers as overrated, including Dave Eggers, earning him enmity in the literary community.

His memoir, meanwhile, has received explosive reviews -- critics either love it, or they write passionately about the venom his tale inspires. The most common accusation, beyond what’s seen as his brazen personality, is that he mined the salacious details of his recovery and pandered them for celebrity. He’s in negotiations for a movie deal based on the book, for which he may write the screenplay.

The book has a stream-of-consciousness flow with little punctuation and odd capitalizations. “The way I write is the closest articulation to how I think and how I feel things. I also wanted the reader to be addicted to it. Be unable to put it down. That would help them understand more what being addicted to something is like. To do that, everything would have to move very quickly.”

Perhaps his use of graphic, in-your-face descriptions may be to blame for some of the firestorm. Frey pulls no punches and softens no edges. He is an undiscriminating addict -- alcohol and pills, cocaine and crack, acid and PCP. Readers learn in exacting detail just how hard the detoxification process is -- how physically draining and emotionally demanding it is -- and how painful the experience of moving through the world as a tentatively sober person can be.

“I was trying to keep it as honesty-based as possible,” he explains. “I don’t think anyone’s written about detox the way I have.” Maybe other writers have forgotten how awful it is or maybe they’re worried that if they write about how awful it is, it’ll turn people off, he says. “When you detoxify yourself, you throw up constantly. You’re sick, constantly. Your body is an utter disaster. I tried to write what I experienced.”

We’re sitting in a quiet living room, the front door open to let in sounds of birds and the morning’s fog, far from the Venice neighborhood where he used to live and where he first met his wife of five years, Maya Frey. A Cleveland native, James Frey left L.A. less than a year ago and now lives in New York. He is quiet, maybe a bit shy. He’s wearing a pale blue shirt that highlights his eyes; a tight cap of straw-colored curls surrounds a cherubic face. He bears no resemblance to the monster of addiction seen in the book, the “obnoxious, hyper-aggressive tough guy” he says he used to be.

When memoir-writing first exploded as a literary phenomenon in the early to mid-1990s, it seemed to spawn an immediate backlash. For every strong and compelling memoir published, there were others marred by self-indulgence, creating a subgenre known derisively as memoirs of dysfunction. Many of these enumerated, with scant literary skill, every form of abuse (sexual, child, drug) in a self-pitying manner, eventually turning readers off. This memoir ennui set the stage for writers like Eggers, whose wildly successful “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” in 2000 was positioned as a kind of anti-memoir, in which irony and a hyper-cool stance were used to distance the work from other, more fervent narratives.

Frey’s book is anything but ironic, perhaps another explanation for the volatile reaction he’s received. Earnest and sincere, his memoir is at times downright sentimental, even amid the repulsive imagery. To be certain, it’s also abundant in the grandiosity and egocentrism that are common in addicts and alcoholics. Yet, read in another light, those elements can be seen as the author’s guileless portrayal of the addict in early sobriety: This is what it really looks like while you’re in the midst of it.

When he sat down to write the book, he explains, the trend toward irony was at its height, but it wasn’t an approach he wanted to follow. “I think the best literature, the best writing, is honest and true.” He wrote the memoir, in some ways, to honor the people who’d been in rehab with him, many of whom have since died from the consequences of their addictions. “You have to be earnest and sentimental to do that.”

The rocky reception the book has received raises other questions about memoir-writing: Where is the line between writing that’s sensational, salacious and titillating -- writing that manipulates horrific experiences to garner book sales -- and the flip side, writing that offers stark honesty to limn important human truths, eschewing a soft-focus lens?

“I very deliberately tried not to glorify ... what I did or how I lived in any way,” he says. He’d read other books in which “it’s all about me, me, me, me -- how wonderfully [messed] up I am. Isn’t it cool?”

He wanted his story to have the opposite effect: “Look at the absolute disaster my life is. Look at what I have to go through to deal with this. Hope you learn something.... I don’t think anybody could read that book and aspire to be me.”