I finally decided to give James Frey’s book a chance.

While A Million Little Pieces was causing such an uproar this past year, I was busy shunning it, ignoring Oprah’s recommendation and subsequent condemnation, and striding past the strategically placed stacks of hardbacks at bookstore end-caps without being enticed in the least.

My years immersed in canonized nonfiction made me scrunch up my nose at the thought of wasting my time with such tripe. But a question always lingered. The mass attraction of this book and its sky-high sales befuddled me. What was it about Frey’s much-beleaguered trauma memoir that catapulted it into the bestseller list? In fact, what makes any book popular?

To understand the bestseller phenomenon, I decided to see how Frey’s book measured up to other nonfiction bestsellers. I chose three additional books that seemed to have nothing in common aside from their impressive financial success:  Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, an intriguing but small-scale narrative of the disappearance of an unheard of young man; Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, a simple story of a dying man’s final days that has become an international phenomenon on the scale of Harry Potter; and a serious, critically acclaimed legal thriller, A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr.  Then I hunkered down, attempting to discover if these books had any similarities that might give clues as to why they became so widely irresistible.

Some parallels weren’t all that surprising. All four authors write with no-frills vocabulary and simple sentence structure. Of course, I thought, accessibility and bare-bones writing are keys to making the books fast-reads. These books were almost effortless. Albom’s book I consumed in one sitting.

Another common aspect of all four is the universal allure of the topics. We’re attracted to the themes in the same way we’re drawn to watching the tragedies on the evening news. We become absorbed in other people’s misfortunes because of the frightening knowledge that it could happen to us (or the happy relief that it isn’t happening to us). In Albom’s book, the theme is facing terminal illness. In Frey’s it’s the grip of addiction. In Harr’s it’s the scary environmental health threats that surround us. In Krakauer’s it’s the mystery of self-destruction, a young man’s suicidal journey. These topics embody our collective fears and pique our interests.

While any of these themes would be fine choices for fiction writers, as nonfiction they become more potent. Think of the end of a film when the words “Based on a true story” roll across the screen. Knowing the story is authentic makes it more significant (and knowing that it was, in part fabricated, as with Frey’s book, makes us feel betrayed).

Adding to the weight of fact is the writer’s ability to create tension.  The muscle of these books as page-turners startled me. Mr. Frey, I hate to admit it, but I couldn’t put your book down. Once I decided to ignore the exaggeration, fabrication and lack of proper punctuation, I surrendered to the power of the plot. I almost never read on the bus or while I’m walking down the street, but I stole every spare minute I could to spend with A Million Little Pieces. I was hooked on this book about addiction.

The same voracious need to read was sparked in the other books as well. “With what have these authors laced their plots?” I kept wondering. It didn’t make sense. In reading the first chapter of these books, we either know or can make a good guess what will happen by the end. Yet we read anyway. We even read greedily.  It’s not that we’re dying to know the end – we could skip to the last chapter for that – it’s to experience the journey with the main character.

And these books all have fascinating characters. They’re more than merely likable. They embody an admirable inner strength. Because we know they’re actual people, their oddities are often more captivating. In a character-driven nonfiction book, writers invite us to participate actively in figuring out what makes the character tick.

Who better to analyze than the main character of Krakauer’s book, Chris McCandless a.k.a. “Alexander Supertramp,” a suburban white kid who drops out of the upper-echelons of society to follow a personal quest that leads to a premature death by starvation in the wilds of Alaska? He ignited my internal psychologist. I forgave Krakauer’s tendency to ramble because I was so invested in the author’s task of interviewing everyone with a first-hand account of this merry madman.

Similarly, turning each page of A Million Little Pieces was like peeling back the many layers of the young Frey.  From the start, the addict is easily detestable. His defensive veneer can be maddening, his personality quirks frustrating and his actions baffling. If only I could sit him down and pummel him with questions: “James, why are you so angry? Why do you want to die? Why can’t you hug your parents?”  I was so engrossed, I simply  had to know what happened to him.

I became bonded in the same way to Jan Schlichtmann, the lawyer of Harr’s A Civil Action. Sure, I probably should have cared more about what was going to happen to the poor folks Schlichtmann was fighting for, but the further I read, the more connected I became to this Porsche-driving, workaholic, high-stakes gambler of an attorney. He became my main man, and I rooted for him and his cause.

Of these four books A Civil Action was the best-crafted and, with nearly nine years invested in the research and writing, Harr’s thoroughness is commendable. Compared to the others, A Civil Action received far better reviews. As a literary work, A Civil Action has the most substance and is the most respected. But it’s not the best selling of these bestsellers, showing that the critics’ word has limited bearing on a book’s popularity in the marketplace.

The not-so-critically acclaimed Tuesdays with Morrie beat the others tenfold in sales. Eleven million paperback copies have sold. It’s been translated into four languages. It’s been made into both an off-Broadway play and a Hallmark-Hall-of-Fame movie, which reruns regularly on the Oxygen Channel.

So what does this almost pocket-sized book have that trumps more weighty books? I think the nature of the story itself propelled this book into the upper strata of bestsellerdom. We all fear death, but even more than that, we fear the end of life.  We distance ourselves from the elderly and the dying, yet we also believe (some societies and cultures far more than ours) that the elderly have an embodied wisdom.  Tuesdays put people in touch with that.

A final commonality in these widely different books is that they all have resonant, hopeful themes. As a people, we want to believe that addiction can be conquered. We need to have hope that individuals can band together to fight evil corporations. We look for ways to comprehend mental illness.  We want to believe that we will be wiser at the end of our lives.