First, this book really could have used an editor.  Aside from the flagrant typographical errors throughout its pages, someone should have told Frey that nobody will actually read, for example, four pages of names of veterans along with one-line descriptiosn of their injuries/ailments.

In this review I will criticize Frey for being trite and unoriginal, so I will refrain from an initial reference to the memoir that made him famous (all other reviewers seem to begin their assessments with references thereto.)

This book is Frey's love letter to L.A.  It's interesting for a non-west-coaster like me to read a full embrace of a city cognizant of all its faults and disappointments.  The book tells us that LA wouldn't be itself, the object of the writer's affection, without those faults and disappointments.  It's a collection of vignettes and essays with four sets of recurring characters, and a lot of characters that don't come back.  The fictional bits are interspersed with "fun facts" and other data about LA.  It's an attempt to draw a portrait of the city in a mosaic fashion, acknowledging that LA is so huge and polymorphus that these characters only occupy small niches.

It's compelling in parts, and it's effective in drawing an attractive portrait of the city.  But by the end I really was not going to be able to take one more breathless account of young idealism coming to LA to die in the Sodom of the cut-throat entertainment industry.  Without spoilers, those four recurrent story-lines are:  1.)  The mega supermovie star who is secretly gay; 2.)  the hard-working Latina maid serving a cold-hearted bitch millionaire boss; 3.) the deeply-in-love young couple who ran to LA from the mid-west and 4.)  the homeless man with a heart of gold. 

Can it get any more canned than that? 

If Frey wasn't already famous, I don't think this book would have been more than a blip on the mainstream radar.  But reading it I had visions of stock characters throughout LA reading it and wondering what the big deal is.  That was my reaction - why is Tery Gross interviewing the author ... and asking him respectful questions?  Did she actually read this stuff first?

So I don't recommend this book, except as an illustration of what you can get away with once you're already famous.