Book Review: My Friend Leonard

I'm sure you all heard about the controversy with Oprah and James Frey over Frey's "memoir" A Million Little Pieces. Personally, I don't care if he lied or not, I thought that was a great book. Anyone who thought it was completely true is living in a dream world. I'm sorry, but how many movies have you seen that are "based on actual events"? Rarely are those movies accurate. So take the first book as it is: a story.

But my focus in this post is not A Million Little Pieces, but My Friend Leonard. MFL starts where AMLP left off.

Most of this book is absolutely ridiculous and lacks the urgency of AMLP (it's hard to top a guy who's trying to beat a drug addiction) and I actually was having a hard time believing that this book was actually good (it was recommended to me by a good friend). The beginning is great (although extremely gut-wrenching), but soon after the initial tragedy, the book takes a sharp turn downwards. Frey paints a picture of his friend Leonard as a man who lives to the excess. Always buying more food than people can eat, and just generally using his money and influence to please the characters it seems like a very shallow friendship. The books coasts like that for the middle 80%. It took me about a month to read this, partly because it just wasn't that interesting. However, the last 100 pages started to pick up and the last 30 or 40 make the whole experience worthwhile. I won't spoil any endings, but the friendship comes out as much much more in those last pages.

What Frey did (at least to me) is to give me a character that I didn't really like and that did things in a manner which is not necessarily the most honorable. He spent a whole book building this persona up. Then when you think there's no saving grace, he explains the character's actions.

It's definitely worth a read, especially if you liked AMLP.

I'll give this book 4/5. The middle that drags on is the reason I can't give it a 5, but the ending is why I won't give it a 2.