Unfortunately, because A Million Little Pieces-one of the best-selling books about drug addiction ever written-has been trumpeted as an unflinching, real-life look into the world of a drug addict, it has helped to shape people’s notions about drug abuse. Frey must have felt that his real, very scary, and very lonely feelings would have seemed weak if it was only preceded by standard-issue suburban teenage angst. I was also miserably, sometimes almost suicidally, depressed, and, from the age of 15, I was taking drugs and drinking almost every day. I was popular enough in high school, I joined the newspaper and acted in plays, and I got into a good college. I grew up in a well-off suburban household with loving parents and no clear traumas in my past. When Frey writes that, after one of his fictitious arrests, he hated himself, saw no future, and wanted to die, I believe him. He drank too much, did some drugs, got nailed for a couple of DUIs and ended up, at age 23, in one of the country’s most prestigious drug-and-alcohol treatment centers. Instead of a crack-binging street fighter, ostracized by both his peers and society, the Smoking Gun investigation indicates Frey was more likely a lonely, confused boy who may or may not have needed ear surgery as a child and felt distant from his parents and alienated from his peers.

Frey’s hardcover publisher, Doubleday, is still standing by a book that Oprah helped catapult to mega-bestsellerdom, proclaiming that “recent accusations against notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.” But by Frey’s own calculus, those readers are in fact owed an apology-or at least an explanation.īased on all the evidence, it seems Frey’s weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a “victim” led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt. In Frey’s telling, all of this culminates with the author’s eventual self-willed recovery, which is presented as a hard-boiled inspiration for others.

Or as Frey himself might put it, A Million Little Pieces is a compendium of “bullshit fantasies” about a life few of its readers have experienced, one redolent with crack binges, alcohol-fueled rages, violent outbursts, self-mutilation, multiple arrests, and several deaths. But as just about everyone in America knows by now, courtesy of a careful investigation of his supposed grim exploits conducted by the Smoking Gun, Frey’s book turns out to be just that, fiction.

A million little pieces oprah