Fourteen-year-old Will Carter's summer gets off to a bad start when his girlfriend leaves him, but then he is cast opposite a major star, Hilary Idaho, in a small movie being filmed in his town and things start looking up.

A troubled youth with cerebral palsy struggles toward self-acceptance with the help of a drug-addicted young woman.

A searing and controversial story of drug and alcohol abuse and rehabilitation, told with the charismatic energy of Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the revelatory power of Burroughs' Junky. By the time James Frey enters a drug and alcohol treatment facility, he has so thoroughly ravaged his body that the doctors are shocked he is still alive. Inside the clinic, he is surrounded by patients as troubled as he: a judge, a mobster, a former...