'A MILLION LITTLE PIECES' SHATTERS TRUST

Many addicts and their families have taken the story of redemption to
heart, but recent revelations add a darker chapter for author

Jari Kral's youngest daughter, addicted to heroin since she was a
teen, lived three months in a car during the winter of 2002.

Kral, a longtime Chicago-area resident, filled years of calendars
with scrawled notations about her daughter's descent into street
drugs, rehab, theft, assault and drug arrests.

The daughter, now 22, was locked in Cook County Jail last fall on
charges of trying to hijack a car and vowing to kill the woman inside
if she didn't get out.

The daughter's addiction to drugs was as real and overwhelming as the
calendars and copies of police reports stacked on Kral's desk--as
anguished as a mother's love, and as unrelenting.

It is that very world of drugs, violence and desperation that author
James Frey claimed to inhabit in his embellished best-selling memoir,
"A Million Little Pieces."

Evoking emotions

As the book's story has evoked powerful emotions, so have reports
that parts of it never happened.

Kral and many like her are angry that Frey lied about what they have
suffered for real. Other readers have embraced the work regardless,
saying it sheds light on a dim existence little understood by those
who haven't lived it. Supporters say it is a best seller because it
is a story of redemption and hope, not because it is accurate.

"This has been my life," Kral said. "I think people who really have
not been in the drug world or exposed to it maybe really don't believe it."

Last week, Frey defended the book as typical of the
not-quite-faithful memoir genre. Oprah Winfrey, whose book club
helped slingshot the memoir up the non-fiction best-seller lists,
likewise said that it--completely true or not--had touched an
uncounted number of lives.

"That underlying message of the redemption of James Frey still
resonates with me, and I know that it resonates with millions of
other people who have read the book," Winfrey said in an on-air
telephone call to CNN's "Larry King Live," on which Frey was a guest Wednesday.

That's easy for Winfrey to say, Kral said.

"It resonated with me," she said, emphasizing the past tense. "Now I
look at it as a story, not a documentary. I doubt everything in the
book. I question him as a person. Is he a stand-up guy or not?"

Police reports compared

The controversy over "A Million Little Pieces" began a week ago when
the Smoking Gun Web site compared actual police reports with key
moments Frey recounted in his book. They matched in only the most
cursory ways, Web site researchers said.

A Chicago woman, Pilar More, filed a class-action lawsuit against
Frey and the book's publishers last week in Cook County. Book club
members, readers and students across the Chicago area and the nation
have expressed misgivings about Frey's admitted fabrications.

"My kids are not happy," said Andy Jones, an English teacher at
Hinsdale Central High School whose students chose the book for a
class project. "The general sentiment is, yes, there is still a
message here and, yes, it is powerful. But to call it fiction [and
not memoir]."

Still, the tale Frey spun and the reaction after it became the
subject of scrutiny are only part of the story.

It is on this March's book club list of the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration office staff, noted
administration spokeswoman Leah Young.

At St. Joseph High School in Michigan, Frey's alma mater, students
have carried copies of "A Million Little Pieces" in the halls and
chatter about it before class bells ring, said English teacher Donna Dumke.

And although the book challenges the worth of 12-step programs, it
has been embraced by recovering addicts and their families, said
Melanie Jordan, inquiries and admissions coordinator at Sunshine
Coast Health Centre, a rehab clinic in Powell River, British Columbia.

"Whether he embellished or whatever, you would find lots of people
who could relate," she said.

The book has been a topic in online chat-room conversations among
recovering addicts and their families, with feelings ranging from
cautious acceptance to outright betrayal, said Chy King of El Paso,
Texas, who owns Sober Teens, a peer support Web site for recovering
teen addicts.

And the arc of the story in "A Million Little Pieces"--an addict hits
bottom, finds something more important than drugs and moves on
despite agonizing difficulty--is cautionary and uplifting enough, say
readers intimately familiar with addiction.

Making a connection

"It was like, 'Wow, somebody finally wrote about it. Somebody else
finally expressed what I already know in a way so others can
understand it,'" said Patty, 43, a biochemist who met her former
husband in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

A pharmacist from Alton, Ill., he committed suicide in 2003 after
relapsing into drug use, she said. She said she thinks Frey's book
and others like it are worth reading.

"It's the stuff that nobody ever talks about," Patty said of
addiction recovery. "People don't talk about the cancer that they've
had, but if they wanted to, they could. This is just not treated [the same.]"

But the credence placed in Frey and the slim hope to which many clung
after reading his book are now more tenuous.

"I thought it was just an incredible story. I liked his bluntness,"
said Kral, a former Flossmoor, Ill., resident who now lives in
Michigan. "But I would rather have known that there were
embellishments. I would have liked to have known that."

Power Of Addiction

The following are excerpted from e-mails to the Tribune:

"When I read James Frey's book I was astounded that someone could
write so well and have lived it. I have a daughter who is in Cook Cty
[County] jail, 22 years old, heroin addict . . . My husband and I
have gotten her every kind of help imaginable . . . She's also a
sociopath, thief, liar and like James Frey a writer and poet. The
audacity of this man to write such a 'story' and not have lived it
makes me sick. I sent his book to my daughter in jail. I even said we
should see if he could help her in some way . . . "

- --Jari Kral, South Haven, Mich.

"At last, a book that tells the blatant reality of the risks of
alcohol and drug addition, the treacherous road to recovery and its
inherent pitfalls . . . In 1989 I married a recovering alcoholic and
addict who was also a pharmacist, and came to know his story and the
story of other recovering alcoholics/addicts as well . . . Well known
around 'the tables' (i.e., 12-step programs and recovery centers) are
the brutal statistics of the natural course of addiction: Of those
who become addicts/alcoholics, few ever seek help, of those who seek
help about 10% find help and attempt recover, and of those who enter
into a recovery program of any kind, only 10% experience long-term
sobriety. My former husband committed suicide after 15 years of
recovery. He had relapsed, couldn't scramble back to safety, and
killed himself."

- -- Patty, 43, Wheaton, Ill.