A Million Little Nit Picks

I finished the Frey book and am relieved to report that he never succumbs to the 12-steppers and AA supporters that surround him. He completes his rehab, stays clean and lives happily ever after, at least until Oprah gets her claws into him.

I guess it also helps that I agree with him when he states that, unlike cancer, alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a choice. An unpopular argument, but he had me on his side rooting for him throughout the book because of that.

He doesn’t believe in God when the book starts, and he remains a firm unbeliever at the end. Good for him.

As far as the content of the book goes, I liked it. Even the bits where he is clearly fabricating stuff to make the situation even more horrific than it was. Root canals without any anaesthetic? I think not. The descriptions are graphic. I skipped over an entire page where he describes pulling out his toenail just because he hates himself. It made me queasy.

So even though he is a liar and a fabricator, if he did even a quarter of the terrible deeds he says he did, starting around age 4, then he was a very bad person indeed.

My quibble with the book is stylistic. Firstly is that he uses no paragraph indentation or spacing between paragraphs. Every line starts at the margin. And he uses no quotations marks, or the word “said”, as in “I hate myself”, I said. He’s having none of it. It’s like this:

He smiled.
I hate myself I said.

This requires concentration that I often don’t have because my reading is bedtime reading and it’s easy to nod off while thinking who said what when and to whom?

Secondly, random use of Upper Case on certain Words. I never figured out the pattern for which Words got upper case and which Ones didn’t.

Thirdly, there are several passages where the text is
laid
out
like
this
each
word
on
a
separate
line.

Which eventually got
on
my
nerves.

Granted as a huge fan of The Man David Foster Wallace, I shouldn’t be grumbling about choices of style and writerly technique, but I just wasn’t sure how these visual tricks helped the narrative.