The battle for Brown's soul shows up in her prose as well as in the events she describes. Most of A Piece of Cake is written straightforwardly, in the articulate language of her latter-day life. She also slings the occasional, incongruous burst of jive: "They may have suspected they were getting to me, but I sho' as hell wasn't gon' show it." Instead of recapturing her earlier self, this language gives the book an air of calculation, as does its heavy foreshadowing. For instance: "There was no way I could have known of the horrible tragedy that lay ahead."
After 300-odd pages of smelly, scrappy, shame-inducing experiences, Brown describes hitting bottom. Though her book is longish and repetitive, she does not share Frey's gift for milking melodrama out of rehab. She just hallucinates spiders that sing We Will Rock You, and in a few days the ugly part is over. Then comes uplift. Somehow the late part of the book manages to be both humbly devout and richly narcissistic, with big whoops of joy for each of Brown's victories. "I asked God if He could somehow get me some bedroom furniture and some dishes," she writes. Always fulfilling her exact wishes, God provides.
Given the specificity with which Brown describes her trespasses, the story's upbeat section is perfunctory. "Recovery wasn't all bad," she writes. "Quite the contrary, it was (and is) all good." Although the book has been a voyeur's delight in descri-bing her life's low points, Brown compresses the eight and a half years of education (on top of full-time employment) that led to her law degree. Suddenly it's as if all the trouble had happened to someone else.
Prepublication copies of A Piece of Cake had cover art depicting a cigarette stubbed out in a chocolate cupcake. Now the jacket features candy-colored sprinkles and good cheer. The first image is more accurate about the book, the second one truer to a culture that almost made a hero out of Frey. It sells a trip to hell and back as a tasty treat.
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