read A Million Little Pieces before it came out. The books editor at the Chronicle, knowing my propensity for drink and, therefore, addiction literature, asked me to review it. I had high hopes: It had the most startling book cover I’d ever seen and came accompanied with a breathless note from either the publisher or agent, who—much like Oprah would do three years later--regaled it as one of the most gripping and brutally honest books they'd ever read.

What did I think? Not much. The writing was overwrought and maddeningly repetitive. My review, eventually axed due to space constraints, called it “A Million Little Pages.” Certain parts were compelling, yes, but I wasn’t a third of the way in before I began rolling my eyes and quashing the urge to set the thing aflame. By the time Frey swaggered into the dentist’s chair at Hazelden and white-knuckled his way through a root canal without the aid of novacaine, my trust had been blown (into—guess what?—a million little pieces). When the Smoking Gun published their account of Frey’s fabrications last month, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I was surprised, frankly, that anyone believed the book in the first place.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so skeptical, I might have been as moved as Oprah and her hordes of book club readers. Wait, no, I take that back. Because the book is bad for all sorts of reasons, not just because it stinks of an addict’s braggadocio. The story is riddled with macho cliches about fighting The Man--whether it be the police, a gay Catholic priest, or AA and its numbing groupthink. Anyone looking for compelling addiction literature would do better to pick up Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, or Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Angels. As a writer, Frey simply doesn’t have the chops. He relies on gimmicks like repetition and capitalizing Important Ideas to convey how Very Fucking Serious He Is. I shouldn't make fun of him for that: In college, I was always trying to grab readers by the collar and spit on them. I used to capitalize Important Ideas, too, a technique borrowed from A.A. Milne and which I fancied avant-garde, because of course, who’s ever read Winnie-the-Pooh? But Frey’s writing reaches for effect so often and so clumsily that it’s downright funny at times. In one scathing review of the book, not-so-subtly entitled “A Million Pieces of Shit,” writer John Dolan dissects one of Frey’s typically melodramatic, self-absorbed scenes, excerpted below:

"There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.

“Hey, Fat Otter.’

He stares at me.

‘You want what I got?’

He stares at me.

‘I'll give you everything.’”

Dolan writes: “Now, can anyone tell me what a ‘fat otter with a flat, armored tail’ actually is? That's right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the ‘large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch’ would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!”

Maybe Frey was altering the facts to protect the beaver’s identity?

Anyway, I’ve been following this story with greedy eyes for weeks. I didn’t like the guy, I didn’t like his writing, I didn’t like it when he said he planned to be the best writer of his generation, I didn’t like his dumb-ass tattoo. Frey is all bravado and bluster; it’s no wonder he hated AA so much. What AA attempts is to strip people of their bullshit, of their exaggerated drunk tank legends, and asks them to take a hard stare at themselves in order to build their lives back up. Humility is key to recovery. It’s something James Frey missed out on. Until now.

Yesterday, I watched Oprah as if it were the superbowl. And it was a superbowl of sorts, a superbowl of smug pundits wagging their fingers at a man’s public shaming. I thought Oprah did an excellent job of interviewing Frey—far, far better than Larry King’s milquetoast session—and I thought Frey did what he could. People booed him. It was scary. He stammered and meandered, and who could blame him? At one point, as Oprah grilled him about the details of one character’s suicide, I watched with my hands in my hair and a cringe cemented on my face. I know there's some greater "significance" to this story, although I’ll leave all that to Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Joel Stein, and all the talking heads of "I Love 2006." Instead, what struck me is how people kept congratulating Oprah for her bravery and courage. I thought: Look at the man sitting beside her! Can you imagine how horrifying this is for him? Can you imagine the megawatt fear in his heart? I don’t like James Frey, and I don’t like his book. But showing up and taking that ass-whupping was an act of bravery. A real one, for once.