My Friend Leonard
If you’ve read Frey’s 2003 debut, the best-selling rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces, you’re already acquainted with his shtick. He has unshackled himself from what most of us understand to be the rules of sentence structure and grammar. He alternates terse broken sentences with loquacious run-ons, and scorns quotation marks, colons, semicolons, adverbs, parentheses, and adjectives–stylistic tics that surely have Strunk and White spinning in their graves.
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In his follow-up, My Friend Leonard, Frey has made peace with the comma, albeit nervously. But given the amount of dialogue–not to mention Frey’s nonstop inner monologue, his penchant for conversing with a dead woman, and his complicated relationships with his truck, a grave, a bottle of wine, and his pit bull puppies–quotation marks would have been welcome too. Many readers will find themselves counting lines back up the page to review, after a long run of dialogue, whether the exchange begins with “I speak” or “he speaks.”
If Leonard is God, Frey is the prodigal son. He starts off scraping by as a doorman at a Chicago nightclub. He’s an emotional zombie, an insomniac whose sleep is fraught with cocained dreams, terrified to be sober, biding his time having vapid conversations with girls in bars and meaningful ones with the ghost of his dead girlfriend. After hooking up with Leonard, however, his spirit brightens and he becomes hopeful. He begins to learn how to love life. He buys a Picasso with his mob money. He gets a girlfriend. He writes a few screenplays, and on a lark he moves to LA to get a straight job. Within a few chapters he’s optioned some movies and directed some others. He’s a regular guy with a house in a canyon, living with the woman of his dreams and making Leonard proud–a far cry from the macho incorrigible who arrived at rehab toothless and kicking.
