A Million Little Pieces

James Frey was born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied film production at Denison University and, post-graduation, briefly lived in Paris, France, where he worked for his father’s company. In 1992, Frey spent several weeks at the Hazelden Clinic in an addiction treatment program. By the mid-1990s, he was working as a film producer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. In 2000, he began writing A Million Little Pieces, an account based on his time recovering from drug and alcohol addiction at the Hazelden Clinic. Marketed as a memoir, the book was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and became a New York Times bestseller. Frey followed this success with My Friend Leonard (2005), a book focusing on his newly sober life after leaving the Hazelden Clinic. The story recounts Frey’s time in jail, the suicide of his girlfriend Lilly, and his ongoing friendship with the mob boss, Leonard. In 2006, Frey faced controversy as the website The Smoking Gun revealed that many of the details in A Million Little Pieces were fabricated. The revelations positioned the author as an unreliable narrator of his own life.

Frey presents himself as the flawed anti-hero of A Million Little Pieces.