A million pieces of .....

by John Dolan Review of James Frey's book

This is one of the funniest book reviews I've ever read.

He nails Frey for what he really is: a complete phony and con artist.

The review was written over 2 years ago but Mr Dolan knew what was up long before the Smoking Gun had ever heard of this clown.

What's unbelievable to me is that neither Oprah or any of her producers believed Mr Frey's stuff. Someone needs their batteries changed in their bs detectors.

Here's a nugget from the article:

James Frey: A million little pieces

This is the worst thing I've ever read.

A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It's a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: the rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.

Frey sums up his entire life in one sentence from p. 351 of this 382-page memoir: "I took money from my parents and I spent it on drugs." Given the simplicity and familiarity of the story, you might wonder what Frey does in the other 381 pages. The story itself is simple: he goes through rehab at an expensive private clinic, with his parents footing the bill. That's it. 400 pages of hanging around a rehab clinic.

It feels longer. It feels like years.

For all Frey's childish impersonation of the laconic Hemingway style, this is one of the most heavily padded pieces of prose I've seen since I stopped reading first-year student essays. Frey manages to puff up this simple story to book length thanks to one simple gimmick: he repeats. Repeats the beginnings of sentences. Repeats the beginnings of phrases. And the endings. Endings of phrases. Phrases and sentences.