A Million Little Pieces: James Frey, Author (Oprah’s Book Club)

A Million Little Pieces author James Frey was born in Cleveland and spent most of his childhood in Ohio and Michigan though he has also resided in Boston, Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, Sao Paulo Brazil, London, Paris, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He graduated from high school in 1988 and received further education at Denison University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1993, however, he was sent to the Hazelden Foundation for the treatment of cocaine addiction and alcoholism after which, he moved to Chicago in 1994, where he worked a variety of jobs. In 1996, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a screenwriter, director and producer. In 2000, he took a second mortgage on his house, and spent a year writing A Million Little Pieces and became a New York Times bestseller, a #1 national bestseller, and an international bestseller. He lives in New York with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey’s memoir of drug addiction and recovery, was a bestseller even before Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club in 2005, but the subsequent revelations about discrepancies between the story and the author’s real life initiated a national debate about the line between fact and fiction.

Filled with graphic scenes of substance abuse and the harrowing experiences of withdrawal, A Million Little Pieces was widely heralded as a self-admonishing and courageously confessional autobiography. It received many admiring critical reviews. In January 2006, however, the author acknowledged the truth of charges that many details in the book were embellished or fabricated. Subsequently, a note to readers was published in later printings, where he apologized to those who felt they had been misled and explained why he wrote the book the way he did. Reactions to these revelations were mixed but readers maintained that the book’s inspirational message was important.