Bright Shiny Morning

by James Frey
Meeting Date:  June 30, 2010
Hostess:  Barb

For all you nay-sayers who hate James Frey for the A Million Little Pieces debacle, I say ... too bad; if that is what it took for Frey to write Bright Shiny Morning then so be it.  Bright Shiny Morning is incredible.  It is a great book and if we had to go through the scandal to get to this book, then it's worth it.

All of the group enjoyed the book quite a lot.  It was fun, during our discussion, to remember some of the lesser stories that we had forgotten by the time we finished the book.  Everyone was great at raising another "remember this" story which prompted another line of discussion (i.e. the trailer park, the African guy with the mini-putt empire, the woman who was raped and bought a gun, etc.).  We also speculated on how we thought some of these tertiary stories would/could come back to intersect the primary stories.  We did talk at greater length about the main stories:  Amberton & Casey, Old Man Joe, Esperanza, Maddie & Dylan.  Some of the themes of these discussions were:  love and hope; the "American" dream (myth); the need to help someone and do they want the help?; whether the women were strong and independent or not; the reasons for having (or not) children; and the unfairness and inequality in (US???) society.
We also talked at length about Los Angeles and the facts that Frey gives us about the history of the city.  We actually had quite an intense discussion as to whether these facts were "true" or not and we were fairly divided on this, some of us never doubting or questioning for a moment that they are, in fact, true (by definition aren't facts "true"?) and others questioning their veracity, primarily because of Frey's epigraph "Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable."  Those who did not doubt the facts, took this statement as a kind of 'fuck you' to Oprah after their battle over whether the stories in A Million Little Pieces actually happened to him.  In fact, several of us liked Bright Shiny Morning so much that we will now read A Million Little Pieces after all the scandal.
We also discussed Frey's writing style in this novel of a stream of consciousness; omitting punctuation, capitalization and repeating phrases.  Some of the group found this a bit annoying, particularly when first starting to read the book, but we agreed that this was a very good technique to give the reader insight into the character's thoughts without having to add extra dialogue or description.  A few of us were amused/intrigued by associating Frey's fictional characters with the real life person who we believed they were based on (i.e. Perez Hilton, Tom Cruise).
Finally, we noted that some of us were disappointed with the ending.  Not to say that we found it bad or inappropriate for the book but rather that we just hoped for something different.

Unfortunately I am missing the breakdown of everyone's actual rating (in fact, I can't even remember who all was at the meeting besides the first four of us listed below).  I do have a record of the overall rating so if you were at the meeting, feel free to add your personal rating if you recall.

Ratings:
Kellie ....................
Barb ....................
Stacey ....................
Lynne ...................9.25
Dannette ..............
Natalie .................
Overall:  9.29