Plumbing the lower depths
William Leith
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES by James Frey John Murray, £16.99, pp. 381, ISBN 0719561000 This book, a memoir, opens with James Frey, a former drug addict, telling us what happens after he takes drugs for the last time. He wakes up on a plane. Some of his teeth are missing. His nose is broken. 'I look at my clothes,' he tells us, and my clothes are covered with a colourful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.'
At this point, Frey, a 23-year-old from North Carolina, doesn't know where he is going — and, perhaps more importantly, he doesn't know where he's been. When he gets off the plane, he vomits again. 'It comes and I recoil from the stench and the pain,' he says pointedly. This line more or less sums up the whole of this book, which is excellent. As the book goes on, Frey's words rush out of him as if he were being sick; his storytelling feels compulsive, involuntary. The more self-disgusted he gets, the more he wants to say: he is invigorated by the taste of bile in his throat.
When the story begins. Frey has spent a decade smoking crack, sniffing glue, snorting cocaine and drinking booze, and he's more messed up than any memoirist I can remember. He's more messed up than Dave Eggers was by grief, and he's more zonked out than Dave Fetzer was after his horrible childhood. When Frey gets off the plane, his parents, who do not understand what has happened to their son, drive him to a clinic in Minnesota. Frey is totally recalcitrant. 'I don't want to think right now,' he says.
But then, when his parents go away, he does want to think. His self-disgust is almost bracing. 'I am lost,' he says. 'I am completely fucking lost.' His response to his situation is worded like a bleak poem: I scream.
I piss on myself.
I shit my pants.
Sitting on a chair in front of the television, he finds himself unable to do anything. He can't even remain seated. 'My muscles go limp and I slide from the chair to the floor,' he tells us. 'I don't like the floor and I don't want to be on the floor but I can't stop myself.' Of course, Frey rallies. But it takes him nearly 400 pages. This is not an easy read if you don't like to see people at their lowest. Frey is told that only a very small percentage of addicts ever fully recover, and the book is full of these mostly doomed people. There is Ted, an addict who is also wanted for statutory rape, and John, who is addicted to anal sex as well as cocaine, and Michael, who is drawn, malignantly, to cheap prostitutes and crack. There is Leonard the gangster, who is 'strange and kind and vicious and magnificent'. Frey discovers that, aside from being some of the most tormented souls on the planet, these are the nicest people he's ever met; together, they shakily plumb the depths. When Frey meets Lilly, a former hooker, these two pale, skinny people fall in love in a way that is both poignant and tragic; it's one of the most romantic things I've read for ages. The forthcoming film, which is to be directed by Gus Van Sant, will almost certainly be a cult hit. I can see Johnny Depp as Frey, and Winona Ryder as Lilly.
Refreshingly, Frey denounces the Twelve Steps; he resolutely refuses to acknowledge a higher power. He wants to get better on his own. By the end, he makes you understand that drug addicts seek pain, as well as trying to blot it out. Pain is part of the point. There's a great scene in which Frey, by now drug-free, tears off one of his toenails and finds himself riveted by the agony. Addicts, he says, 'would give everything we have ever had and everything we will ever have, if only we could be normal'. The good thing about Frey is that he writes as if he needs to; I hope his new compulsion thrives.
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