JUMPING INTO THE FRAY {FREY}
POST # 7
A funny thing happened as I was about to go to the Strand book store to purchase a copy of James Frey's best seller A Million Little Pieces. I wanted to see for myself what his 'magic' is that has made this book such a widely acclaimed 'non fiction' memoir of the author's submission and eventual triumph over his drug abuse and confessed bad behavior.
As I was about to leave my office I heard a report on the radio that there were some serious questions as to the author's truthfulness. Following up I read the 7 page detailed expose of Mr. Frey's apparent exaggeration of the facts in the service of artistic license. {The Smoking Gun.com}
The story has legs as today in the New York Times there is a very humorous satire called "A Million Little Corrections" by Tim Carvell that makes fun of the obvious blurring between the categories of fiction and non fiction.
I suppose it is a less humorous experience for Random House - the publisher of A Million Little Pieces as they have purportedly unprecedentedly offered to refund the full purchase price to anyone who feels they have been misled.
I have consulted a number of people as to their thinking about this literary flap. Most take the position that because his style is apparently riveting it really doesn't matter that he has admittedly greatly embellished the facts.
Try as I might to extend this celebrity grace I cannot be so generous. I appreciate that what follows may be interpreted as the musings of an envious 'want-to-be celebrated author whose subject matter, like Mr Frey's, is the topsy turvy realm of substance abuse and rehabilitation. If so I confess that I am envious. But my envy is not one of sour grapes and a wish to pull Mr. Frey down. Mine is a constructive envy ... if he can do it so can I. I feel more challenged than ever to get my as yet unpublished work PUBLISHED.
It has been thirty five years since I was an assistant director of Odyssey House - a noted seminal therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin abuse. For the first three months I thought it was an embodiment of my personal Garden of Eden. During the next 14 months I experienced Odyssey as equivalent to a communist Gulag.
As my doubts became undeniably more insistent I appointed myself the scribe of the community. I kept a detailed event by event journal. My reflections became the basis for an unpublished manuscript called: Odyssey: Personal and Professional Perspectives in Addiction - The best and the worst of the 1960s.
It has been twenty five years to do justice to the life defining experience I had at Odyssey. During that time I had an agent who liked my work. We received encouraging but ultimately rejecting responses from numerous publishers - one of them was Random House.
In a way it was good that I did not have my book published up to this point. It has allowed me to learn to write my truth in a way that I believe finally does justice to the complexity of my complicated inner and outer experiences pre, during, and post Odyssey House.
Whatever else my account is - it is 100 percent faithful to the facts of the matter. And in my personal and professional judgment it should be so. Having been on the front lines of the so called War on Drugs for the past thirty five years I know that this malady is no laughing matter. I further know that significant change can come about but there is no magical cure. The key to effective treatment is helping the addict learn how to bear increasing dosages of frustration and other such so called negative feelings such as ambiguity, complexity, not knowing, weakness, ambivalence and the like. Such an approach inevitably leads to the spontaneous growth and development of a solid identity.
There is some truth to the idea that the addict eventually has to say no to drug taking. But the challenge in rehabilitation is to create the maximum just right conditions in helping the addict to learn how to say no. In this connection my major motivation in posting this blog is to broadcast the message to an apparently large group of interested people that rehabilitation is not a simple effort of will power that can occur in six weeks. Rather it is a process that necessitates the substance abuser to adopt an attitude of struggling with struggle. This attitude requires the substance abuser to become a truth seeker in asking and searching for the answers to two guiding questions: Who am I and what do I really want.
My proposed book is an authentic account of Odyssey House, a well known therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin addicts, at a time of exploding drug abuse; and the struggle of the residents and counselors in coping with the charismatic leader Dr. Judianne Densen -Gerber both an innovative genius and malevolent mad scientist cult like figure, as seen through the eyes of a troubled, dedicated truth seeking, budding psychotherapist.
I am proud of the following endorsement:
"Gibbs William's book is an entertaining and revealing trip into the social-psychological dynamics of a therapeutic community from the inside out. The author describes in insightful detail, through a variety of dramatic incidents, how the process works and at times doesn't work in treating addiction. Of considerable interest is how the author's personal psychological issues became an important part of his therapeutic role in Odyssey House. The book is also significant in describing the manner in which the people in power in a TC, especially the founder and Director Dr. Judi, can fall into a cult-like posture. I highly recommend this book for therapists attempting to treat addicts, and anyone involved in learning more about the addiction problem and its possible solution. Given the gravity of the American drug addiction problem--this includes everyone."
Dr. Lewis Yablonsky, Emeritus Professor of Criminology
California State University-Northridge; and author of 19 books including:
The Therapeutic Community and Synanon – The Tunnel Back.
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A Request:
If anyone knows of a publisher or agent that might be interested in publishing my book I would appreciate it if you would show them this post. Thank you.
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