Leonard is a man whose business is of unsavory origins.  James works for him for a little bit delivering briefcases to different locations, but decides that he wants a completely clean life and stops to work on becoming a writer.  Leonard continues to show up in James life at times of sorrow and joy.

James lives life hard and it is very evident in his books.  Like his other novels, his punctuation and capitalization is far from what we all learn in school, but it somehow works instead of bothering me in this book.  I read this while visiting family over Christmas, and still managed to finish it in two days as I would read at night before falling asleep.  I just wanted to know what was going to happen.

This book details several different stories within it.  There is a young couple who ran away to LA to try to make their dreams come true, a Mexican woman who works as a maid and deals with issues of confidence, a group of homeless men led by Old Man Joe, and a movie star named Amberton Parker and his wife.  James Frey gives you bits and pieces of their lives, skipping between them and interspersing the narratives with information about the city (“The average citizen of Los Angeles consumes 250 tacos a year,” p.255).  I have no idea whether these tidbits that are put in are true but they provide a much needed break from the intensity of the lives of these characters.

This was a bit of a hard heavy book for me to read.  Paragraph form and punctuation weren’t used in a traditional sense so I would need to reread a sentence or section to make sure I had it right.  Plus, the topics dealt with by the characters were hard…and did not always end with dreams being fulfilled.  However this book worked for me and I kept turning pages, sometimes skimming through sections, to get back to the characters to find out what happened next.