One last shot of, uh, at Million Pieces

Before we go any farther, I want everybody to know I can stop writing about James Frey and his, uh, shall we say fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces any time I want to. I've only had a couple ... of blogs, that is ... and it's not a problem. And, like I said, I can quit any time I want to.

But this morning's Chicago Tribune carried a batch of letters in response to a Jan. 30 column by cultural critic Julia Keller. She loved Frey's book, but the letters were all over the map. "Good writing is good writing, no matter what it's called," said an English teacher at Winnetka's New Trier High School. Another, perhaps a snowbird in the Florida keys, said, "He should have published his book as fiction!" Another reader, from suburban Highland Park, said, "Besides being an A-plus writer, James is helping recovering addicts and their families. The good that James is doing with his book far outweighs the lies." But another reader, from Downers Grove, said, "A recovery 'story' based in dishonesty is not helpful to those wishing to recover."

By the time I got finished with all the letters, I decided I'd have one final little Million Little Pieces blog for the road.

The stakes here are higher than what genre category to assign to a controversial book. Addiction is a life-threatening disease, and Frey's story doesn't look like anything that would help most addicts and their families. Instead, it looks like an almost certain invitation to relapse.

Heather King, author of a memoir called Parched, explained both the real-world and literary stakes in a Jan. 17 column for PW Daily, an online publication of Publishers Weekly magazine:

"A ballsy, bone-deep memoir," Salon.com called it, but for any alcoholic worth his or her salt, throwing up blood, puking on oneself, and committing petty-ass crimes in and of themselves couldn't be bigger yawns. What's gritty is the moment, knowing you're dying, when the world turns on its axis and you realize My way doesn't work. What's ballsy isn't just egomaniacally recounting your misdeeds; it's taking the trouble to find the people you've screwed over, looking them in the eye, and saying you're sorry. What's bone-deep -- or might have been if Frey had done it -- is figuring out that other people suffer, too, and developing some compassion for them. [...] Sobriety, in my experience, isn't the staged melodrama of sitting in a bar and staring down a drink to prove you've "won" -- as Frey does upon leaving rehab. It's the ongoing attempt, knowing in advance you'll fall woefully short, to order your life around honesty, integrity, faith.

So, in fact, is writing. It's every writer's sacred honor to "get it right," but perhaps the burden falls heaviest on the memoirist...

I'll leave the genre questions to the literary critics, but I believe recovery demands rigorous honesty and the support of others. Instead, Frey offers what King calls "testosterone-fueled rage" and "studly ire." Bluster and swagger, I'd say.

That doesn't mean Frey's writing may not have literary merit. Who am I to argue with Julia Keller? She's been taking a 400-level lit class at DePaul this semester, and I've been enjoying the way she engages with 18th-century Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. (I was fascinated with Dean Swift, too, and I love the way she captures his complexity with a few deft strokes in a daily newspaper.) So in the end, the literary questions come down to a matter of taste. Hemingway could be a little high on testosterone, too, come to think of it, and he wasn't a bad writer.

But when I see people writing letters to the editor about how Frey's bluster, swagger and testosterone can help other addicts, the literary taste I get is the taste of ashes.