A Million Little Pieces – James Frey

If you're Oprah, don't read this. I have had this book targeted on my shelf for ages and have long been debating my near-term To Read List so that it may be included. I do not know why I kept pushing it off, but I have finally come around to read the biggest story of the year 2007!

I enjoyed it, it had some great stuff to offer. It also had some stuff that buggered me. In all, though, I am glad I finally took the time.

It starts out without giving the reader any sort of back story. Just a drunk/drugged out junkie going through a bit of withdrawals maybe that force his breakfast, lunch, and dinner to be poured out all over his clothes, sopping them no matter where he may find himself. Turns out his parents picked him up at the airport and are delivering him to a rehab facility, the best in the country.

He is inexplicably shitty. Not just covered in vomit, and later his own poo, but because he has no interest in getting better. He is shit, just totally burned out from crack and alcohol and glue and gas and anything else. I was almost disappointed at the things he has left out that could have also worked to get him high. Like Pledge. Or fingernail polish.

He is also told that he is in such horrible shape, and his body is rejecting sobriety through withdrawals so vehemently, that he will literally die the next time he hits the crackpipe. Pretty damn sure, at least. Sure enough to say that if he goes out into the world he will be dead within days. And as if this weren't shit enough, he has to get a couple fillings and root canals because he has not exactly taken care of his Chiclets during his stint as a Whitney Houston impersonator. The catch here is that because he is undergoing treatment for substance abuse, he has to do it without any help from anesthetics or pain killers. Having your ass-rapist shout “I'm going in dry!” behind your back comes to mind.

So that's him. But to counter all of this, he has a heroically awful, anti-hero personality. He is unequivocally fierce, with a stubbornness and temper that set up incomprehensible violence and cataclysmic meltdowns. His stubbornness is also so deeply rooted that he absolutely refuses, at all levels, anything to do with the Twelve Steps. “They won't work on me,” his mantra reminds his captors throughout. We need no reminding, because we get it the first fucking time he says it.

That is really one of the very few things I disliked about the book. The repetition. The repeating of word or words. Mostly word. Repetition. Repeating. Repetition. Repeating.

Repeating.

Repeating.

…

…

Repeating.

Repeating.

Repeating.

See how annoying that is? It happens, and happens often in this book. But I gritted past it. It wasn't “I'm going in dry!” level of unbearable.

The other thing I disliked was the bit about the Catholic Priest in the end. Seemed unnecessary. We get it, dude. You are a badass and no one messes with you. Especially when you were high. Got it. You don't have to lay down how tough you are or slip one in at the end about how nobody crosses you.

I really do feel like it completely matters not – as in zero part of me cares – whether this book is factual or a fictional biography. I do not think it affects the reader's experience of it one bit. I went in not caring and came out not caring, with no opinion on how much I would be affected if it is 99% true or 1% true. Point being, Oprah is a twat. I believe she believed everything she was reading was factual, then berated James Frey simply because its not being completely factual made her out to look a fool. Don't she know?

Ocean at the End of the Lane

So Neil Gaiman went and wrote another story for children! Then another one, about a child, that I sort of had the impression might be a children’s book in the same light as His Dark Materials are children’s books.

It is about a man who is attending a funeral and makes a stop at the house on the end of the lane where he grew up, remembering his friend Lettie who had an ocean in her small pond. He then flashes back, and the story takes away to the time when he was seven, remembered by referencing his seventh birthday party – a party in which nobody showed up and he took his books and his Batman figurine upstairs to his room. He then learned that he was to be moved from his room to make way for a new tenant, as money was tight, and a South African opal miner shows up, runs over his cat, gives him a stray to make up for it, then steals his father’s Mini and kills himself in it. This event brings about a creature from another dimension, and she throws money at people and tries to hurt them whilst giving them things they desire. Lettie and the young man venture into the other realm to make sure the creature no longer throws money at people, and it uses the young boy as a door to cross into our realm. The monster shows up as an attractive young nanny to take care of the boy and his older sister, very much in a creepy Merry Poppins sort of way, if Merry Poppins were a babe, and named Ursula Monkton. Ursula puts everyone else into some sort of trance, becomes vindictive and nasty towards the boy, then gets his non-violent father to try and kill him by drowning him in the tub, then has sex in the study with the boy’s father as he escapes, then gets eaten by ravenous shadow-figures that are sort of like birds.

Pretty cool children’s book, if you ask me. I would let my kids read it. But not before they finished His Dark Materials.

I liked it, not just for all the reasons I mentioned, but because the story telling was so good. Gaiman really never ceases to surprise me with his quickness in taking a story from one direction and turning it on its head. This one had a lot of elements from others, namely Neverwhere, Graveyard Book, and Stardust, for me. Neverwhere, in the sense that a person visible and knowable in our world can become a door to the other world, which is not just a cliché fantasy but some sort of fucked up imagination I probably would not voluntarily visit that exists in Gaiman’s mind. And Graveyard Book because of the way the Hemstock family are all liminal figures who understand and can determine who and what goes in and out of each realm and orchestrate maneuvers that keep everything in their proper place within the two. But, because they are liminal figures (which many of my favourite characters throughout literature often are), they share nothing about how they are able to do these things.

Also similar to Stardust is that misdirection, where Gaiman builds an air of children’s fantasy story-telling, letting you think that you may be reading a bit of a kids’ book, then presents fucking. And not “proper British sex,” either, but babes fucking dudes. It always gets me!

 Another, this time unfortunate, thing I realized when I read this book, is that Gaiman drew many of the background events to set up the plot from his own life. Which tend to be pretty fucked up. I say this is unfortunate, because the story-telling is so good that I finally came to the realization that all great authors pour into their works some elements of their own background, and the darker their past, the better the book. So events such as him climbing his drain pipe growing up, having a tenant who killed his kitten, stole his dad’s Mini and killed himself in it, being the only one present at his seventh birthday party, and still being excited to go read books and play with Batman toys, these things all make for a dark past and a great story. I was pretty regular, and pretty damned spoiled as well. I am therefore incapable of entertaining you all with something so inspiring.