A Million Little Pieces (Oprah's Book Club) - Softcover

I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want 50 bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, 500 hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.

The rage-fuelled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut. --Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com

"Gripping.... A great story.... You can't help but cheer his victory." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Anyone who has ever felt broken and wished for a better life will find inspiration in Frey's story." --People

"Ripping, gripping.... It's a staggeringly sober book whose stylistic tics are well-suited to its subject matter, and a finger in the eye of the culture of complaint.... Engrossing." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"A frenzied, electrifying description of the experience." --The New Yorker

"We finish A Million Little Pieces like miners lifted out of a collapsed shaft: exhausted, blackened, oxygen-starved, but alive, thrillingly, amazingly alive." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"One of the most compelling books of the year.... Incredibly bold.... Somehow accomplishes what three decades' worth of cheesy public service announcements and after-school specials have failed to do: depict hard-core drug addiction as the self-inflicted apocalypse that it is." --The New York Post

"Thoroughly engrossing.... Hard-bitten existentialism bristles on every page.... Frey's prose is muscular and tough, ideal for conveying extreme physical anguish and steely determination." --Entertainment Weekly

"Incredible.... Mesmerizing.... Heart-rending." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A rising literary star ... has birthed a poetic account of his recovery. [A Million Little Pieces is] stark ... disturbing ... rife with raw emotion." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Frey will probably be hailed in turn as the voice of a generation." --Elle

"We can admire Frey for his fierceness, his extremity, his solitary virtue, the angry ethics of his barroom tribe, and his victory over his furies.... A compelling book." --New York

"An intimate, vivid and heartfelt memoir. Can Frey be the greatest writer of his generation? Maybe." --New York Press

"Incredible.... A ferociously compelling memoir." --The Plain Dealer

"Insistent as it is demanding.... A story that cuts to the nerve of addiction by clank-clank-clanking through the skull of the addicted.... A critical milestone in modern literature." --Orlando Weekly

"At once devastatingly bleak and heartbreakingly hopeful.... Frey somehow manages to make his step-by-step walk through recovery compelling." --Charlotte Observer

"A stark, direct and graphic documentation of the rehabilitation process.... The strength of the book comes from the truth of the experience." --The Oregonian

"A virtual addiction itself, viscerally affecting.... Compulsively readable." --City Paper (Washington, DC)