Bright Shiny Morning is an official piece of fiction, unlike A Million Little PIeces by the same author that started out as a memoir and turned out to be fiction after all… and a great piece of fiction in my mind so why did it have to be misrepresented?
Bright Shiny Morning is not that great. It’s built around a number of characters, all in LA, some of which appear for only a short vignette and some endure, as well as a number of semi-random thoughts about LA that are pretty boring and forced in their randomness. James Frey has a knack for creating characters we care about and for putting them in improbable situations we somehow believe (like gang members hunting down a sweet Midwestern couple) but this is too much and too weird. Read A Million Little PIeces instead.
