When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for 20 years just isn’t going to cut it with a publisher. James Frey was well aware of this when he embellished A Million Little Pieces to make it more ‘appealing’, and how right he was: we lapped it up.

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