To the extent that it is remembered now, James Frey’s 2003 addiction-and-recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces is noted chiefly as a succès de scandale. Young badass-drunkard-crackhead Frey refused to toe the twelve-step recovery line while a patient at the renowned Hazelden clinic. Instead of admitting he was powerless over alcohol like a good boy, he alternated between clenching his teeth against demon rum and breathing deeply while listening to jazz. Then he put the whole brutal experience on paper. Little Pieces was selected by the Oprah Book Club and sold a bazillion copies; it seemed a breath of fresh air disrupting what had become, by the end of the 1990s, a stale parade of midlist recovery narratives. Then it was revealed—oops—that things didn’t quite go down like that. Frey never did jail time for drunk and disorderly, as he alleged; he never got a root canal without Novocaine; and if he ever had a junkie girlfriend, she never committed suicide as he said. He drank and drugged too much, stole money from his parents, spent a few hours in jail before they bailed him out, and went to rehab. The part about not liking it, though, that was true. But “between the idea / And the reality,” as the poet said, “Falls the shadow” (Eliot 80). And this shadow happened to be so dark that both Frey and his publisher, power broker Nan Talese, were hauled back on Oprah to be dressed down by her in front of the cameras. In retrospect, the incident stands out as an early highlight of the so-called truthiness era within which we now helplessly reside. But just because Frey’s book is more interesting as a cultural rather than a literary artifact doesn’t make it valueless to the student of literature. While at Hazelden, the narrator of Little Pieces astutely

中文翻译：

---

我们的饮酒问题：恢复和不良美学

就现在人们记住的程度而言，詹姆斯·弗雷 (James Frey) 2003 年的成瘾和康复回忆录《一百万小件》主要被认为是丑闻的成功案例。作为著名的 Hazelden 诊所的一名患者，年轻的坏蛋、酒鬼和疯子 Frey 拒绝接受十二步康复路线。他没有像一个好孩子那样承认自己对酒精无能为力，而是在对恶魔朗姆酒咬紧牙关和一边听爵士乐一边深呼吸之间交替。然后他把整个残酷的经历写在纸上。Little Pieces 被奥普拉图书俱乐部选中并卖出了无数本；到 1990 年代末，这似乎是一股清新的空气，扰乱了中产阶级复苏叙事的陈旧游行。然后它被揭示 - 哎呀 - 事情并没有像那样发展。弗雷从未像他所说的那样因醉酒和扰乱秩序而入狱。没有诺沃卡因，他从未接受过根管治疗；如果他有过瘾君子女朋友，她也不会像他说的那样自杀。他酗酒吸毒，从他父母那里偷钱，在他们保释他之前在监狱里呆了几个小时，然后去了康复中心。不喜欢它的部分，虽然，那是真的。但是“在想法/现实之间”，正如诗人所说，“阴影落下”（艾略特 80）。而这个影子恰好太黑了，以至于弗雷和他的出版商、权力掮客南塔莱斯都被拖回奥普拉，在镜头前被她打扮得漂漂亮亮。回想起来，这起事件是我们现在无助地生活的所谓真实时代的早期亮点。但仅仅因为 Frey 的书作为一种文化而非文学作品更有趣，并不能使它对文学专业的学生毫无价值。在 Hazelden 时，Little Pieces 的叙述者敏锐地