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January122006

Pants on Frey-er

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From Chris Lehmann's Slate review of A Million Little Pieces (April 21, 2003):


Frey wants to offer a corrective to what he sees as the pieties (and possibility) of recovery—and to grant us an unvarnished glimpse of the gritty junky life. When a recovered rock star lectures his ward at Hazelden, Frey thinks to himself, "The life of the Addict is always the same.... There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession.... To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth."

This equation of "the truth" with the junky world's degradations is the corollary of Frey's view that all recovery theology is falsely comforting bullshit. It's also what has already won the book praise from critics like John Homans, in New York, who marvels at Frey's textbook-rebel penchant for "confronting the powers that be and winning every time." But there's nothing new or compelling (let alone heroic) about this pose: It is, in many ways, the classic arc of the genre Frey claims he's boldly renovated—the conversion memoir. From St. Augustine to Rousseau to Dave Eggers and Elizabeth Wurtzel, readers of memoirs are invited to marvel at the incorrigible badness of a narrator as a sort of trust-exercise: Surely someone who conceals so little of their unpleasant behavior can't be lying.

Assuming Chris stands behind his 2003 review (if he's changed his mind, I'll eat my laptop), I'm sure he's delighted to be taking the side Oprah isn't. Interestingly, in light of the current fur flying in Freyland, he ends his review:

[In A Fan's Notes, Frederick] Exley also denied himself the cheap consolation of romanticizing his afflictions: He took everything about his life seriously and himself not seriously at all. Most of all, he knew a life's story could never be squared with something as stark and unequivocal as "the truth"—whether or not the truth was all that mattered. That's a saving wisdom all its own, even if it won't fit onto a tattoo.

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