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I'm not usually a fan of rehab stories but James Frey's Oprah-sanctioned memoir is a standout in its genre for a few reasons.

Firstly it is quite extreme. The book starts out with Frey waking up on a plane, missing his four front teeth and bleeding from a hole in his cheek and he has no recollection of what happened to him or how he got on the plane. The now famous scene of the book is when Frey needs to have multiple root canals performed without the help of novacaine or anaesthesia. Though that scene is brutal to read it was the first moment that struck me as memoir-bullshit, a common problem in which memoir writers need to stretch the truth in order to make a good story. There's a few points where I felt this way but I've learned to accept this in memoirs.

Another striking thing about the book is that it is written in sort of a junkie prose. Short staccato sentences, no quotation marks for the dialogue, words that get capitalized randomly. It's not as annoying or hard to read as you might think but it is noticeable as a gimmick on occasion.

What really makes this stand out from its rehab genre though is Frey's determination throughout his stay at the center to rebel against the idea that the only way to get sober is to follow the 12 steps, go to AA and let God into your life. Frey does it his way (which involves self-determination and a book of Taoisms) and though it seems too easy and smells a bit memoir-bullshitty again it demands respect for him for curing his addiction without replacing it with a new one.

Posted at December 31, 2005 04:52 PM