Now that James Frey has
acknowledged that major features of his memoir A Million Little Pieces (reviewed in Metapsychology
8:39) were invented rather than fact, it is not so clear how to react to
his work.  Some will dismiss it out of hand as a pack of lies, but that’s not a
very thoughtful response.  Other recent memoirs have been pretty hard to
believe, (especially those of Augusten Burroughs) and some have frankly blended
facts and lies together partly in exploration of the genre (see Lauren Slater’s
Lying).  Just about every memoir will disguise people’s true names, and
many of them will describe the distant past with so many small details of
conversation, weather and household decoration that they have to be unreliable
descriptions unless the author was followed around by someone with a video
camera recording all the important events.  Eyewitness testimony is often
untrustworthy and memories of trauma can certainly be flawed.  Any critical
reader of a memoir will wonder how accurate the author’s recollections are and
how different the versions of events would be if given by other people in the
story. 

Nevertheless, when coming to Frey’s
follow-up memoir, My Friend Leonard, one wonders whether there really
was any such person as Leonard.  He’s not a very believable character: a
criminal with a heart of gold, very wealthy and powerful, a former addict who
unofficially adopts Frey as his son.  Now that we know that Frey himself is a
less brave, less interesting character than he portrayed in his first memoir,
it becomes even less credible that, if Leonard existed, he would have wanted
Frey as his son.  As each event follows the next, one wonders whether any of
the descriptions are true.  At the start of the book Frey’s new girlfriend, the
one he met when he was in a treatment program, also a recovering addict and the
one true love of his life, hangs herself just before Frey arrives in town to be
reunited with her, a bunch of flowers in his hand.  It’s a very dramatic
moment.  Too dramatic?  Do some searching on the Internet and it is easy to
find allegations that there was no such suicide.  It certainly makes the story
more gripping.  Frey spends the following months in mourning, struggling not to
return to his former life of alcohol and drugs.  Yet he makes sure to keep a
bottle of potent cheap wine in his apartment and he spends his time with his
old friends, in bars during the evenings, getting drunk while Frey drinks cola
and plays pool. 

Leonard comes into town and changes
Frey’s life around, putting him into a different apartment and giving him a job
that is obviously associated with criminal activity.  Frey gets paid handsomely
for doing rather little.  Eventually, Frey quits this job in favor of an honest
day’s wage: he decides to go to Hollywood to become a script writer.  He starts
to lead a more sociable life, forming a relationship with a woman and getting
himself some dogs.  But he has only moderate success, and he is not always so
good at staying in relationships.  Leonard is there for him many times,
providing him advice and moral support, mysteriously coming and going.  But
ultimately Frey makes it on his own, without ever going to a single AA meeting.

Frey uses the same distinctive
grammar, punctuation and formatting as he did in his first memoir.  He avoids
all quotation marks, and he never indents the first line in his paragraphs. 
Often for dramatic effect he omits comas or semi-colons.  He uses many short
sentences.  All of this gives the feeling that the reader is listening into
Frey’s internal voice, and creates an unusual sense of intimacy.  He sounds
like the narrator to a black and white detective movie, telling the reader it
was a dark and rainy night when there was a knock at the door.  He is both
terse and surprisingly open about his feelings, his crying and his agony.  Like
it or not, Frey is a powerful writer, although occasionally it all feels too
stylized. 

There’s no doubt that Frey has been
dishonest and self-serving as a memoir writer, and this undermines the book as
a story of his life.  This knowledge affects the experience of reading this
memoir.  Nevertheless, as an account of living life as an ex-addict without the
use of the usual forms of group help and therapy, My Friend Leonard
remains a forceful and unusual work. 

Links

• Smoking
  Gun piece on Frey
• Random
  House statement on Frey (Adobe Acrobat file)
• Review of
  Augusten Burroughs: Running with Scissors
• Review of
  Lauren Slater: Lying

© 2006 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Addiction