Managing the Crisis: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the Addict-Subject Confession

Abstract

Managing the CrisisJames Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the Addict-Subject Confession Allan G. Borst (bio) Nothing is true, everything is permitted. —Hassan I Sabbah In America, if your addiction isn’t always new and improved, you’re a failure. —Chuck Palahniuk, Choke When Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), he transformed drug addiction from pathology into narrative and made the life of the drug addict a work of art.1 De Quincey also assigned his Confessions a task apart from this aesthetic transformation: “I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life: according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive” (1). In these opening remarks, De Quincey applied practical function to Confessions and the genre that his text inaugurates: the addict-subject confession.2 In the twenty-first century, the addict-subject confession still functions according to De Quincey’s dual purpose: to make one’s struggles in life into a story and to render this story instructive and beneficial to one’s self and others. In the United States, the addict-subject confession has been colonized by a culture dominated by self-help, self-improvement, personal makeover, do-it-yourself, and self-actualization. Critics even suggest that contemporary self-help culture relies on its ability to endlessly co-opt the structured treatment of addiction developed by Alcoholics Anonymous (Salerno, 27–30, 133–60; Miller and McHoul, 148–51). As addiction has been increasingly used to describe almost all possible behaviors, the addict-subject confession has more and more become the model (in form and function) for individuals to [End Page 148] speak about their lives. In this way, the addict-subject confession has become the narrative form par excellence of contemporary American culture.3 Like De Quincey’s Confessions, this essay has a dual purpose. The main objective is to consider how and to what ends the contemporary world of self-help “reads” and adapts the addict-subject confession. In particular, this essay will examine Oprah Winfrey’s promotion, reception, and use of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), the first major addict-subject confession of the twenty-first century. At issue here is not only Oprah’s initial assertion of authority over Frey’s narrative on her talk show, but also her conflicting responses to allegations that Frey had fabricated details and passages of his memoir.4 The events involving Frey and A Million Little Pieces lay bare the structures of the contemporary self-help culture that Oprah distributes. In effect, when Oprah asked her audience members to identify with Frey and use his addict-subject confession to help them reflect on their own personal problems, she compelled them to become addict-subjects; addicted perhaps not to drugs or alcohol, but to Oprah and self-help. The secondary objective of this essay is to compare the events surrounding A Million Little Pieces with the historical treatment of the addict-subject confession in the United States. Like De Quincey’s Confessions, addict-subject confessions in the United States have promised readers an insider’s look into the physical, mental, emotional, and mystical sensorium of addiction. Consequently, these confessional narratives have made a dramatic impact on the cultural truths and beliefs about addiction. Whether read as cautionary tales or forms of bildungsroman, addict-subject confessions tend to highlight personal, quotidian struggles against a backdrop of otherwise pathological definitions of addiction. During the 1840s, the American Temperance Movement, which spent the majority of the nineteenth century trying to moderate and eventually wipe out alcohol consumption in the United States, experienced major internal dissension when the Washingtonian Temperance Society began using addict-subject confessions (see Blocker, 30–60; Griffin, 67–78; Pegram, 26–31; Tyrell, 150–90). In attempts to challenge mainstream Temperance and redirect the movement away from its religious and prohibitionist platforms, the Washingtonians, like their indirect legatees in Alcoholics Anonymous, invited recovering and recovered inebriates to deliver [End Page 149] confessions at public meetings.5 The Washingtonians claimed that these confessions, which they also...

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