This book is a memoir, or rather a blow-by-blow account with suspiciously total recall, of a young man's time in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation unit in Minnesota. Although he was only twenty-three at the time, he was already a veteran consumer of both drugs and alcohol on a heroic (or anti-heroic) scale. He started drinking at the age of ten and taking drugs at twelve: a regrettably, and increasingly, frequent pattern among children in our age of unprecedented prosperity and enlightenment.

James Frey was no child of the slums. On the contrary, his father was a successful businessman, a member (as was his mother) of the striving and respectable bourgeoisie. The worst that could be said of the author's upbringing is that his father put his career ahead of the emotional