It is no wonder James Frey felt he had to lie and embellish in A Million Little Pieces; everybody these days seems to think you aren’t yet a real addict until you’ve shot a man for crack, drank until your eyes bled, and swaddled yourself in tattoos. But there’s no competition to see who is more or less of an addict; because in a very fundamental way, we are all the same. My disease is the same as every addict’s, even the shotgun-toting, eye-bleeding, tattooed crackhead alcoholic. I just stopped sooner. Hopefully, I will never find out how much farther down the rabbit hole I might have gone.
