'Drugs rehab? I just said no'

Tackling addiction has become a multimillion-pound industry. But when James Frey decided to kick his habit, he did so with the aid of just willpower and a nasty trick involving pulled toenails. And now his remarkable memoirs are set to put the rehab world in a spin, says William Leith

James Frey's first book, A Million Little Pieces, is a true story about a guy who, among other things, vomits over himself, soils his pants and, horribly, pulls one of his own toenails out. The guy is Frey himself. The book is definitely going to be huge.

For one thing, it's a rehab memoir, and people love reading rehab memoirs. Frey is tattooed, attractive and thin. He used to be addicted to cocaine, crack and alcohol. One journalist described him as "coiled". Others say his writing reminds them of Bret Easton Ellis and Dave Eggers. And, as a man who writes vividly about his own self-disgust, Frey believes that he has earned the right to take himself seriously. "I want to be the greatest writer of my generation," he said recently.

There's no question that he's a good writer. As soon as you start reading the book, Frey's voice rings out. It's clear and sharp and turbocharged. Frey states things blankly and moves on. His train of thought is intense and unstoppable. Sometimes he forgets to punctuate. The book starts with the author waking up on a plane, not knowing why. "I lift my hand to feel my face," he tells us. "My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen shut." He has been taking drugs. He has blacked out. He is 23. A decade of self-abuse lies behind him; rehab beckons.

But the crucial point comes when Frey rejects the 12-step programme he has embarked upon. This is a dramatic moment in a book full of dramatic moments, and will be one of the most memorable scenes in the forthcoming film, which will almost certainly be directed by Gus Van Sant. "We're recommending that you attend AA," Frey is told. "I thought we were through with this bullshit," he says. In a rousing speech, he goes on to say: "I don't believe in the 12 Steps. I don't believe in God or any form of Higher Power. I refuse to turn my life and my will over to anything or anyone, much less something I don't believe in."

We are living in addictive times. All over the place, people are revealing themselves as addicted to things – to self-gratification and self-harm, to sex and celibacy, to prescription drugs, exercise, carbohydrates, eating, not eating. And right now, Frey's is the most important voice in addiction culture: this is the clearest and most powerful statement we have of a man who says "no more". He was addicted to drugs, he does not want to be addicted to rehab.

He is not like Liza Minnelli, who attends a clinic for eight weeks every year as part of her recovery, or Michael Barrymore, who has been to the Priory eight times. For Frey, "addiction is not a disease. Not even close."

Frey's writing is discomfiting. "I look at my body," he says. "My skin is sallow and white. My torso is covered with cuts and bruises. I'm thin and my muscles sag. I look worn, old, beaten, dead. I didn't always look like this."

But addiction memoirs are about feeling alienated and unloved. They contain the same emotions as pop songs. "Growing up," writes Caroline Knapp in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story, "I never heard my parents say, 'I love you,' not to us and not to each other." As Elizabeth Wurtzel says in her cracking snortfest More, Now, Again: "I hate me. If anyone has ever been in love with me for real, I don't know about it." She also says: "There are no human beings in this story. Not really. That's my favourite thing about my pills: they are my only relationship." And, as Frey tells us even more brutally: "If I weren't me, I wouldn't want to touch me."

Frey begins his memoir in the traditional place – at rock bottom. One of the most satisfying things about addiction stories is the journey from despair to hope: the greater the despair, of course, the more satisfying the hope. "I look at my clothes," writes Frey, "and my clothes are covered with a colourful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." This, the rock bottom of incontinence and physical squalor, recalls the Arsenal footballer Tony Adams's memoir, Addicted, which begins with Adams on a two-day bender. On the second morning, he says: "Amid the filthy state that was now my house, the first clothes that came to hand were a pair of jeans that I had soiled a couple of days before. I wasn't too worried about the stains."

But all this brutal honesty doesn't quite feel degraded – it feels brave, even cool. As Ann Marlowe writes in her heroin memoir How to Stop Time: "After I'd stopped doing dope, it occurred to me that cool is the way of describing from certain exterior viewpoints what registers as loneliness from the inside. Thus the celebrated cool of black people and jazz musicians and junkies. And when you are alienated enough from your feelings to be able to identify with the exterior viewpoint, you decide you're cool." James Frey writes about himself with as much detachment as I've seen in a writer. "I am what I am," he says, "which is an Alcoholic and a Drug Addict and a Criminal. I have no excuses for what I've done or for who I am."

A Million Little Pieces is written in a wired-sounding present tense, as if rehab were a constant state. It gradually dawns on you that, in a way, this is how James Frey will always feel. As the reader, you feel boxed in, as if there is no escape, even for you. It's very involving. It's the most extreme rehab book I've read, in that it's almost all about craving: there is very little harking back to the period when Frey actually took the drugs. The writer renders certain words in capitals, which makes him appear even more alienated. At the Clinic, he sees Patients, Doctors and Nurses. He makes his way to and from his Unit. He is, he keeps reminding us, "an Alcoholic and a drug Addict and a Criminal".

And he's angry. Like Tony Adams, who describes his old self as violent ("I wanted to hit him," he says of Gordon Strachan), and like Ann Marlowe, who says that addicts are "constantly on the verge of a temper tantrum", Frey is quite capable of losing it. Walking through the grounds of his rehab clinic, "I see a tree and I go after it. Screaming punching kicking clawing tearing ripping dragging pulling – it is a small tree, a small Pine Tree, small enough that I can destroy it." When someone discovers him, "I breathe hard, stare hard, tense and coiled. There is still more fucking tree for me to destroy I want that fucking tree."

In interview, Frey has been depicted as terse and profane. He says "fuck" a lot. He no longer has what he describes as "The Fury", but he is impatient with stupid questions. He's from North Carolina. When he hit rock bottom, his parents were living in Tokyo. The rehab clinic he attended was Hazelden, in Minnesota. He is now 33, and has just done a 14-city book tour of America. He is a fan of Céline, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski and Bret Easton Ellis. He said to one interviewer, who asked him how he felt about being described as the new Dave Eggers, or the poster boy for the rehab set: "I don't want to be a poster boy, the new anyone or anything, or any sort of teacher. I am a writer. I wrote a book. Nothing more."

There are, of course, others who have rejected the rehab route before Frey. Elizabeth Wurtzel, for one ("That's the trouble with AA. It's like a kind of prison. It may rehabilitate some people, but many others just learn to be better criminals"), and Ann Marlowe. Nick Charles, the author of Through a Glass Brightly and the founder of the Chaucer Clinic, a rehab unit for alcoholics, says: "The very thought of staying in treatment for the rest of my life and standing up in smoke-filled rooms horrifies me. I wasted enough bloody time with the bottle!"

Even so, Frey's rejection of AA is uniquely emphatic, even cool. He is told that, without the support of AA, his odds of recovery are "a million to one at best". Frey says: "Those odds don't scare me."

The toenail incident is a horrifying example of that stubborn determination. When Frey gets "The Fury", his uncontrollable rage, he knows what to do. "Feed it pain," he says. "Feed it pain and it will leave me. Feed it pain and it will go away." This is an important moment. Frey is telling us that, when an addict feels bad about himself, he has an urge to make himself feel worse. This is why drugs are such a problem. They work, not because they make you feel good, but because, in the end, they make you feel bad. In a way, the drugs work because they don't work; another paradox central to addiction literature. Without drugs, Frey is forced to rip his toenail out. "My fingers and my foot are covered in blood," he writes. "I can see the nail through the red, hanging by its base. I know the Fury sees it because I can feel it. It feels like a starving demon."

Nobody knows for sure why this demon appears. Elizabeth Wurtzel felt unlovable. Caroline Knapp's parents never talked about love. Tony Adams felt desperately lonely, a sensitive man who lived in the world of football, where people don't talk much about their feelings. Ann Marlowe says she "rarely felt at ease" as a child. And James Frey? As a baby, he had a painful ear condition that went untreated. He screamed a lot. As a kid, his parents moved to a small town. He didn't get on with the local kids. Then his parents moved to Japan. But who knows? These are the kind of stories we all tell each other. Our lives make us all angry. That's why we love rehab memoirs.

This is a good one. It might even be a great one. It ends on a note of muted hope – just the right note. "James has never relapsed," he tells us.

'A Million Little Pieces' is published by John Murray, price £16.99