But he didn't listen. He took it "one day at a time, and soon the ones added up to 22 years." He enrolled in a journalism class at Middlesex Community College and "started writing about the darkness I had just come out of." His professor suggested he send one of his stories to the Globe. Not long after, an editor called him up: " 'Richie, we wanna pay you 500 bucks for this.' I thought, Holy shit, man. That's a lot of heroin."
He can laugh about it now. Two decades on, he's remarried and has a young son. He's amassed some impressive journalistic bona fides. He's happy. Yet he still felt compelled to go spelunking through his tar-black past.
Partly, he says, it was to help others who, like him, "had dreams about the needles chasing" them. Partly, one presumes, it was because he had a publisher willing to pay for his story. And partly it was to provide a corrective to the bluster — much of it, we later came to learn, fictitious — of James Frey's infamous recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces.
"I think, as a writer, he's a really talented guy," Farrell says of Frey. "He has this unbelievable ability to paint a picture and show people. But what really pissed me off is that whole bravado bullshit. James Frey is no tough guy. When he went to that bar at the end and stared down that shot? Bull. Shit. There's nobody on this Earth that does it like that. I don't care how tough you are. You can't white knuckle it. Because if you do it will beat you, it will destroy you, it will come back and bite you in the ass."
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