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 THE
MISSING PEACE OF
A
MILLION LITTLE PIECES
©
2006 by Jim Robinson
As many of you have heard, there is quite a
controversy in the book world right now. James Frey’s
memoir, A Million Little Pieces, had been a best-seller
several years ago, and then disappeared from the radar. But
when Oprah Winfrey highlighted the book as her book-of-the-month
selection, new attention was drawn to the work in a big way.
Frey appeared on Oprah’s show. Oprah
gushed. There was lots of talk of hope and healing, and the
crowd dabbed at their eyes. Oprah wanted the whole world to
know that this man had overcome his demons, and shown that
there was always a dawn following the storm. The apparent
dawn, though, appears to have had a few clouds.
Some of Frey’s “facts” seemed
less than factual, and some folks went searching into the
author’s past looking for the truth. It turns out Frey’s
“memoir” was as much fiction as fact.
THE TRUTH
An acquaintance gave me A Million Little
Pieces to read a couple of years ago, long before the
Oprah controversy. I had asked the woman if she would read
my own memoir entitled
Prodigal Song, and she was struck by the fact that
my story was in some ways thematically similar to a “wonderful”
new book she had discovered. She wanted me to read it, and
I did.
The book had a strange effect on me. I thought
the author’s style, a sort of bare, stark prose, was
edgy and in ways effective. But the tone kept me uncomfortable.
It wasn’t the incessant crude words (though certainly
he and I seemed to hold different ideas about the beauty of
language), or the details of the author’s experiences
in a drug and alcohol treatment facility; these are all topics
with which I am personally very familiar indeed. There was
something else about it, something unsettling. Something dark.
And once I reached the end of it, I was convinced the book
couldn’t be true.
“What do you mean?” the woman asked
when I’d told her my feelings. “It’s a memoir.
Of course it’s true.”
“I don’t doubt that the story is
real,” I said, and at the time I had no reason to. “That’s
not the kind of truth I’m talking about. I do not judge
the man’s heart. But reading the book, I couldn’t
help wondering if the guy really is an alcoholic.”
The woman blinked. She had just finished my
book, and now knew about my own alcoholism and resulting plunge
into hopelessness and near death. She had read what happened
to me that created such darkness, and the miracles that saved
me. She knew about my work now as an addiction counselor.
“What are you talking about?” she
asked.
“Well, I can’t diagnose the guy
from a distance,” I said. “But he sounds like
a rage addict who partied too much. He’s angry at the
beginning of the book, and angry at the end. He struggles
with surrender. He discounts 12-Step recovery and its reliance
on God, and to the bitter end denies that alcoholism is a
disease. The book has very little beauty, grace, or redemption.
At the end, he stops drinking by staring down a shot of whiskey
and then swaggers away like he’s just won a gunfight.
I came away from the story feeling that if he is alcoholic,
he’s a relapse waiting to happen.”
The woman was confused, but unconvinced. She
vigorously defended the book, and questioned my motives. Finally,
she said diplomatically: “Well, your book certainly
is a different kind of book.” That was as close
as she got to expressing anything resembling a compliment.
As much as she liked Frey’s story, I doubt she cared
much for mine.
HOPE AND HEALING
As I’ve said, all this happened long
before the Oprah scandal. When I found out that she had recommended
the book to her vast reading audience, I was stunned. I’d
always perceived her as someone deeply committed to bringing
people a message of hope. I assume her motives were honorable.
But this book? I couldn’t care less whether
or not all of the details of the man’s story were factual,
frankly. There was something else about the book that concerned
me. Something that made it not only a bad choice for representing
healing from addiction, but in fact made the book
dangerous.
I’m an alcoholic, and a drug addict.
I’ve been clean and sober for seventeen years. I now
work in private practice, counseling those who share my disease.
I know how we think. I know how we feel. I know how lonely
we can be, even in a room full of people. The pathology
of our thinking is a baffling one, even to trained professionals
who might have considerable “book knowledge” regarding
addiction; if you’re not “wired” like an
addict, it’s tough to figure us out. We’re a special
breed. And healing must come to us in a special way.
What disturbs me about A Million Little
Pieces isn’t its factual dishonesty. My concern
has to do with how it might impact addicts who read it, as
well as how it could negatively affect the already distorted
impressions held by many in society.
Frey’s “solution” for his
“problem” wallows in the same emotional existentialism
and narcissism embodied in the addiction disease model. In
true recovery, we addicts discover the seeming paradox of
faith that Jesus taught concerning all humans: To win, we
must surrender. To find strength, we must become powerless.
To keep the boat from crashing on the rocks, we must give
up control. The anger and resentment to which we have desperately
been clinging will kill us, unless we give it all away. Lost
in the smoke and mirrors of shame and fear, we addicts must
discover an elusive Truth indeed.
THE MISSING PEACE
In my own
memoir, near the end, I recount a conversation with the
man who walked alongside me during my difficult first months
of getting clean, a companion from within my new-found recovery
fellowship.
Twenty-one years—he
says again. I hadn’t believed him the first time.
He’s giving me a ride to a meeting, just as he had
for two weeks now. The neon night of Memphis moves past
us in blurred streaks.
Twenty-one years—I let
the words ride out of my chest on a deep, hopeless sigh,
feeling small and inconsequential, like an ant surveying
the pyramids.
He smiles. “I wouldn’t get too
hung up on time,” he says, one hand on the wheel,
in control. He’s in his fifties, face deep-lined,
eyes both tired and wise, body still hard and military-trim,
gray hair cropped close to his head. He looks confident,
at ease with himself and with me.
“How did you do it?” I
ask, and there must be something miserable in my voice,
something straining against my pitiful first few days, against
the seemingly endless and impossible road before me, because
he looks over for a moment, silent, then back at the road.
“Don’t push,” he
says, and the lightness in his voice is gone. “You’re
going to have to let it all go. “The peace won’t
come until you stop fighting…” and his voice
trails off. A brief nothing. Then—“Really,
all you have to know right now is this…”
And I hold my breath, waiting for the magic
solution, the answer to my growing madness, some easy way
out. And he says, with the smallest of smiles playing at
the corners of his mouth, looking at me as if he’s
known me all my life—
“There is a God. And you’re not
Him.”
Jesus, the Great Healer, turns to the cripple
alongside the pool at Bethesda, and asks a simple yet terribly
complex question: “Do you wish to get well?”
Well, do we? Because the healing of hopelessness
and resentment is about much more than some universalistic
mish-mosh of “inner discovery.” The disease of
addiction has biological, psychological, social, and spiritual
elements inherent in its structure; no one-dimensional approach
to treatment will suffice. But primarily, recovery is about
getting honest—with ourselves, God, and others.
That’s the missing peace. AA literature, for example,
stresses the need for “rigorous honesty,” knowing
that all addicts have long since lost touch with what the
word even means.
To finally connect with my true self, I must
one day at a time lay at the feet of Christ all the anger,
fear and shame. To stubbornly hold it in my clenched fists
will rob me of the peace and joy that God offers to all who
have wandered far from Him.
For the Christian in recovery, we must learn
that our courage comes not from staring down the enemy, but
instead looking deep into the golden eyes of Christ.
And in them, we find Peace.
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