James Frey's One True Thing

Written by Stanton Peele

Stanton Peele and Amy McCarley

For all his lies and wild exaggerations, nobody seriously disputes that James Frey did successfully overcome alcohol and drug addiction without the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Too bad his description of why and how he accomplished this - which might help many others - has gotten lost in Frey's spectacular fall from grace.

James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, became a best-seller after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in October, 2005. In his memoir Frey, a young man from a prosperous family, reported in gory detail the consequences of overimbibing alcohol for a decade and a three-year crack binge. After what he described as years of police run-ins and blackouts, Frey finally was sent to a treatment center (unnamed in the book, but later revealed to be Hazelden) at age 23 after a fall down a fire escape left him with a broken nose, four teeth missing, and a hole in his cheek.

But it turned out that Frey had made up the most exciting incidents of substance abuse in his book, The Smoking Gun website revealed in January of this year. In the primary example of this, Frey claimed to have hit a police officer with his car after smoking crack. Figuring that a big lie is as easy to tell as a little one, Frey added to this fiction that he resisted arrest and fought with police while attempting to incite a riot among bystanders, and to have as a result served three months in a county jail. None of this was remotely true (although Frey was drunk and had a minor mishap with his car, he was extremely polite to a police officer and spent a few hours in custody).

As a result of these and other lies, Oprah publicly stripped Frey of his Book Club status. Lost amid all of the furor about Frey and his dishonesty has been Frey's rejection of his treatment at Hazelden, of its 12 step program, and of AA - from which Hazelden, like virtually every other private hospital program in the U.S., takes its treatment principles. Indeed, from the start of his stardom, little has been made of this aspect of Frey's work, and Frey has seemingly downplayed it - certainly on the Oprah Show.

This article addresses the sources of Frey's deceit - and the ease with which people accepted his tall tales - while reasserting those parts of his book that are true and make the most sense according to psychological principles and addiction research. As one example of his iconoclastic views, Frey declared: "Addiction is not a disease. Not even close. Diseases are destructive medical conditions that human beings do not control. . . . People don't want to accept the responsibility for their own weakness, so they place the blame on something they're not responsible for, like disease or genetics."

Why Did Frey Lie, and Why Did People Accept His Lies?

Frey's raucous memoir is a wild and wooly tale of drinking and drug abuse, exotic sexual and other exploits, death, and physical violence - with Frey as the existential hero at the center of these events. His melee with police and supposed subsequent jail sentence are the primary examples of his fictitious John Wayne persona. Frey depicts himself as a macho character barely capable of restraining - and often giving vent to - his violent impulses.

But why would Oprah, Random House, and 3.5 million readers believe the unending stories of death and violence Frey spins? Frey insinuated himself into a train accident that killed a girl he knew; the girlfriend he was supposed to reunite with after leaving jail hung herself just before he arrived; Frey was originally facing years in prison, but a judge and crime figure he met at Hazelden conspired to reduce the sentence to months in jail - all of these Frey stories are demonstrably false.

Even The Smoking Gun did not initially question Frey's accuracy, since they are used to people hiding their police run-ins and prison records. Rather, they were simply trying to discover a mug shot. The uncovering of Frey's string of falsehoods was thus inadvertent. TSG now can move on to Europe to investigate Frey's story that he feared he murdered a priest who tried to grope him by kicking him repeatedly in the groin (homophobic fantasies, anyone?).

Frey addressed this testosterone-fueled caricature he created for himself in an apologia at the Random House Web site. "I made alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which portrayed me in ways that make me tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or am." The policeman questioned by The Smoking Gun who arrested a polite Frey might be closer to the mark: "He thinks he's a bit of a desperado. . . . making a bunch of crap up." Frey is typical of many privileged young men who dream about being bad asses.

But Frey had other reasons to lie. Drug degradation sells. People want to hear about the horrible things people do while high on crack and drunk. Given this, Frey might well have concluded that amplifying his war stories would enhance their appeal.

Frey had a chance to observe this process close up. He describes a speech given by a former patient, a rock star, to Hazelden inmates. The man detailed ridiculous levels of drug and alcohol use (a $4,000-$5,000 daily drug habit, "five bottles of strong liquor" a night, 40 valium to go to sleep). The lies outraged Frey: "The truth is all that matters. This is fucking heresy."

Indeed, Frey could regularly observe the embellishment of lurid life stories at his various group meetings. Accuracy is not a requirement at these confessionals - vividness is. Many or most AA members undoubtedly exaggerate their exploits in their efforts to upstage one another. After all, the only thing worse than being an addicted sadsack is being a dull addicted sadsack.

Of course, Hazelden staff didn't call the rock star on his lies. In their view, such outlandish claims serve to instruct gullible patients about how their use can escalate beyond their wildest imagination. One sidelight in all of this is how important it is to question public and private testimony about substance abuse degradation. Our cultural ethos supports such horror stories - at Hazelden and elsewhere, you simply can't say enough bad about drugs.

To review the history of ridiculous claims about drugs (and, alcohol, for example during the Temperance period) is beyond the scope of this article. However, we can briefly recall here that, in January of 1968, Norman M. Yoder, commissioner of the Pennsylvania Office of the Blind, claimed that six college students blinded themselves by staring at the sun while tripping on LSD. The story was widely reported in the legitimate news media, although it was a fabrication. In 1980, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke wrote about an 8-year-old addict who had been taking heroin since he was five, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. This story too was made up.