My Friend Leonard -- James Frey

Call me crazy, but I don't think that the cover art really fits with the text.  Try the first paragraph:

On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray.  I was standing in line for lunch and I didn't see it coming.  I went down.  When I got up, I turned around and I started throwing punches.  I landed two or three before I got hit again, this time in the face.  I went down again.  I wiped blood away from my nose and my mouth and I got up I started throwing punches again.  Porterhouse put me in a headlock and started choking me.  He leaned toward my ear and said I'm gonna let you go.  If you keep fighting me I will fucking hurt you bad.  Stay down and I will leave you alone.  He let go of me, and I stayed down.

This book is the follow-up to Frey's first book, A Million Little Pieces, which chronicled his time in rehab.  My Friend Leonard picks up with James leaving rehab to serve a short stint in jail and then, after jail, trying to put the pieces of his life together and stay sober.  The title character is a mobster that James met in rehab, a man that decides that James is his adopted son, a man that continues to support James (emotionally and sometimes financially) after they both re-enter the real world.

I loved this book.  I loved the story--sometimes it would seem so unreal that I had to remind myself that it was a memoir, that it was true.  I loved Leonard and Snapper.  I loved James.  I loved his writing style.  He ran words together to describe mixed feelings in a way that I found extremely effective--in another, different book it wouldn't have worked, it would have felt lazy, but in this book it seemed right and perfect. 

It made me cry--at some points my eyes would just well up and at others I would sob.  I cried all over the damn book.  Highly recommended.