I EXPECT JAMES FREY to be intense and aggressive. I have read both his books charting his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and it is the self-loathing, the brutality, the desire to hurt, especially to hurt himself, that sticks in your mind. Even when he is describing his emotional vulnerability, his language is visceral, violent and disturbing, the vernacular of the tough guy who is so saturated with rage that while he can write about his fragility, he finds it almost impossible to show it.
Yet 12 years after he took his last drink, and his last sniff of cocaine, crack, glue and all the other substances that left him barely alive, he is clearly more anxious about our meeting than I am. Sitting in a hotel lobby in London he screws his hands together, his toes twitch, he chews gum, he avoids eye contact. He looks so uncomfortable that it is hard to know what to say, particularly as there are no clear answers to the central questions his story raises: what makes an addict, and how do you stop using?
The statistics are grim. The Hazelden Rehabilitation Centre in Minnesota, where Frey spent several weeks, has a 17 per cent success rate, which makes it the most successful in the world. Of the fellow addicts he describes in his first book, A Million Little Pieces, only two never relapsed; the rest are dead or in jail. “I don’t know how I got through it,” he says. “I think it’s a combination of wanting to, which is the most important thing, having good friends, being lucky, and it was bad enough that it scared me. It was a clear decision: quit or die, and I was pretty scared to die.”
That choice was delivered to Frey by doctors when he was 23. He had been using alcohol since he was 10, drugs since he was 12, he had a hole in his cheek that would be repaired with 41 stitches, and four missing front teeth. These were replaced a few days later, requiring root canal surgery that was administered without anaesthetic. His description of the procedure, and his tolerance of the pain, is both a magnificent piece of writing and the first sign that underneath the hopeless, broken tough-guy exterior is a stubborn strength that will be his redemption. “That stubbornness, if you can flip it, works to your advantage,” he says. You mean the stubbornness that made you reject people for so long, that made you an addict, is now what keeps you sober? “Right.”
Frey’s second book picks up his story after he has left the treatment centre. He is in jail, serving a sentence relating to crimes committed before his treatment, and although he has neither drunk alcohol nor used drugs for some weeks, he remains an alcoholic, a drug addict and a criminal. He has no home but he does have a girlfriend called Lilly and when he is released from prison he will be reunited with her. He is too late: Lilly, the only person who has made him want to live, hangs herself the night before he reaches her, and Frey buys a bottle of the cheap rough alcohol that he knows will kill him. But before he drinks it he rings Leonard, a fellow addict and criminal. My Friend Leonard tells of the slow and often agonising journey towards a conventional life that followed.
“You think, ‘I can quit drinking and everything will be fine’, but you don’t think about the fact that when you’re an addict you’ve learnt to do everything in the context of your addiction,” Frey says. “So when you remove the addiction you’ve got to learn to do everything over. Psychologists say that your emotional growth is stunted at the age when you first started using drugs: that means I’m like a 10 or 12-year-old. So when I quit I had to learn to talk to people, to sleep, to get up, to take a shower, to walk down the street. Some big things and some little things, and it’s a shattering experience. Very scary. You feel very insecure, very fragile, very vulnerable. A lot of drug addicts don’t like these feelings — that’s why you become a drug addict in the first place — so when you ’re walking round feeling like that it makes you want to use drugs and alcohol.
“It took me several years to learn to go to sleep. It’s not fun but in a lot of ways it’s a giant confidence-building exercise because every time you feel insecure and get over it you feel stronger. One of the hardest things about quitting is that you stop and you want to feel better right away. You don’t. For me it took years to normalise and stabilise.”
Frey rejected the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme and forged his own way. “Maybe it’s my personality type, but I never just accept somebody saying that’s the way you have to do it. It’s like somebody saying when I’m 5: this is the way you become a human. There’s no right or wrong way, there’s no one way. The only way is don’t do it, but beyond that how you force yourself not to do it is different for everybody.
“How do you tell someone like me that if I go to some meeting once a day and trust in God, which are absurd concepts to me, that everything’s going to be OK? Well, you don’t because I’m not going to listen. You don’t have to go to that meeting, you don’t have to believe in God, you just have to figure out how to do it on your own and you can be a stubborn bastard through the process.
“Alcohol and drug addictions are a process of making decisions. I decide when I want something, I go get it and use it, and I decide when I want to stop using it. If you stop it’s because you’ve made a decision, not because it’s some disease that has suddenly gone into remission. For a lot of people that notion is unhelpful because it lets them off the hook. People often want to make themselves out to be victims, as opposed to taking responsibility for who they are and what they do.”
Does he still feel the urge to use? “Yeah, but not often. When I feel anything powerful, whether it’s happiness or sadness, joy or rage, my natural instinct is to take a drug or drink to make the emotion go away, to feel like that.” He moves his hand along a flat level. “But I know that, so it’s easy to dismiss it.”
Why don’t you want to feel happy? He has married, he has a five-month-old daughter — he must have experienced supreme happiness in recent years? Frey has stopped twitching but his response is measured and analytical, not at all emotional. “It’s not that I don’t want to feel happiness, it’s just that some part of me is uncomfortable with strong emotions. I don’t know if that ’s because they’re stronger than other people’s, if it’s because I learnt to deal with them differently, or because for a large chunk of my early life I dealt with them through using drugs and alcohol.”
These days the self-loathing has dissipated because he no longer has any reason to hate himself. He lives in SoHo, New York, with his family, and they lead a comfortable life, though not an ostentatious one, he says. He points to his crumpled clothes: “Gap, Kmart, Kmart. I live a mellow, simple life, I hang out with my wife, and a lot of my self-worth is built into making my own way in the world. A lot of the shit in the book was surreal, but at this point my life is surreal because all my dreams have come true. What do I do now?” Try and stay in the cloud? “Exactly.”
Frey’s first book has helped many addicts to clean up, and his second will explain that the tough stuff isn’t over on the day you succeed in stopping. There will be films, of course, but his next book will be a novel, for the good reason that Frey has had enough of being the focus of attention and, I suspect, of revisiting his past. Yet it says something about his integrity that throughout our conversation he has used the first person. He is not a man who compromises.
