He drank too much, did some drugs, got nailed for a couple of DUIs and ended up, at age 23, in one of the country’s most prestigious drug-and-alcohol treatment centers. Instead of a crack-binging street fighter, ostracized by both his peers and society, the Smoking Gun investigation indicates Frey was more likely a lonely, confused boy who may or may not have needed ear surgery as a child and felt distant from his parents and alienated from his peers. Frey’s hardcover publisher, Doubleday, is still standing by a book that Oprah helped catapult to mega-bestsellerdom, proclaiming that “recent accusations against notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.” But by Frey’s own calculus, those readers are in fact owed an apology-or at least an explanation.īased on all the evidence, it seems Frey’s weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a “victim” led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt. In Frey’s telling, all of this culminates with the author’s eventual self-willed recovery, which is presented as a hard-boiled inspiration for others. Or as Frey himself might put it, A Million Little Pieces is a compendium of “bullshit fantasies” about a life few of its readers have experienced, one redolent with crack binges, alcohol-fueled rages, violent outbursts, self-mutilation, multiple arrests, and several deaths.
But as just about everyone in America knows by now, courtesy of a careful investigation of his supposed grim exploits conducted by the Smoking Gun, Frey’s book turns out to be just that, fiction.
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