Book Review: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

Confession: I'm not really into memoirs. As far as genres go, they rank below everything except for crimesploitation, bodice rippers, sexy supernatural creatures (exception: Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and anything involving dragons (this includes tattoos) or spaceships, tying roughly with chick lit. I have a variety of reasons for that, but that's mostly because autobiographers tend to be navel-gazing, self-important liars. Or, more kindly, truth-stretchers. When I read an autobiography, I assume that a good part of it is at least exaggerated, and it has served me well over the years.

Apparently, James Frey embodies all of those negative aspects of autobiographers and is gigantic, plagiarizing jackass to boot. This is good, because it means I don't have to feel bad about thinking that A Million Little Pieces was freaking terrible and that he's a godawful writer. I kept finding myself wanting to take a red pen to the text and leave snarky notes like, "Dear James Frey, You are not e. e. cummings. Knock it off with the Quirky Capitalization; it highlights your Mediocre Writing and makes you sound like A Pretentious Jackass."

I also had a running monologue that was in the key of, "Oh my god, people actually believed that this guy was for real? Are you KIDDING me?" Like, seriously. People are so gullible.

2 out of 5 stars, because it's not as bad as Twilight and is mercifully shorter than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.