I did something I don’t recall ever doing before–I recorded an Oprah show. I’ve been following the A Million Little Pieces bru-ha-ha out of the corner of my eye ever since it broke that his “memoir” was just that, a “memoir,” more fiction than fact. But I’m not a fan of Oprah’s show, so I didn’t realize she was having author James Frey back on her show today.
And apparently quite a show it was. You couldn’t turn around on the internet today without bumping into a story about Oprah apologizing for initially defending the author and then scolding him for making her feel “duped.” Lucky for us Chicagoans, the show airs a second time each day at 11 p.m. I’m home earlier than I thought from my movie, so I’m headed downstairs to catch the re-run.
Anybody else watch it?
Addendum, Friday Jan 27th:
An interesting show. Oprah looked genuinely upset and moved by the situation. She admitted she was wrong, something she said was easy to do because it was the right thing to do. She was angry, upset and embarrassed and she let Frey have a piece of her mind on live TV.
Frey looked and sounded like a college kid who’d been caught plagiarizing a paper, hedging answers and looking genuinely uncomfortable. And after it was all over, he still insisted that his book was a memoir, not fiction, after admitting he’d lied and embellished throughout.
I was surprised to learn during Oprah’s interview with the publisher, Nan Talese, (who I didn’t think came off any better than Frey did), that memoirs aren’t subject to any fact checking. That they should be is pretty obvious. Naively, I thought they were.
And didn’t I read somewhere that Frey had shopped his book around as a novel, to no avail, so it was changed (By him? By the publisher?) into a memoir and it sold? I was hoping this topic would be addressed, but I haven’t heard anything more about it.
Unfortunately the word fraud was never used. The publisher, and I’m guessing the author, made a lot of money from A Million Little Pieces, much in part to its status as an Oprah’s Book Club selection. And like a lot of white collar crime, admission of guilt doesn’t come with the appropriate financial repercussions. (Invariably, someone who’s bilked millions of dollars will have to pay a $200,000 fine, keeping a tidy profit.) Nothing was said about this either.
I too am not really a fan of Oprah (and especially not of her “victims” book club), so I don’t make a point of seeing her show.
I did catch a bit of it on Anderson Cooper last night and I must say it was definitely uncomfortable to watch. Frey looked like a two-year-old caught in a lie by his mother. I actually felt sorry for him. Not for his lying, but for having to do the fessing up part in front of millions (no pun intended) of people.
Some people (on the morning shows) who saw the entire interview said he was pretty much unrepentant. His publisher looked horrified, though – I saw her face–talk about strain.
BTW: Check this out
“Frey looked and sounded like a college kid who’d been caught plagiarizing a paper, hedging answers and looking genuinely uncomfortable.”
Having failed a number of college students for plagiarism, I can report that they’re all slow to admit their guilt, trying on every possible excuse (“I just forget to attribute the info,” “I didn’t think rough drafts counted,” “I accidentally copied it from the Web site”) along the way.
Read Jennifer Weiners’s take on the whole thing. Very interesting.
http://jenniferweiner.blogspot.com/
But when you think about it, should any of us really be suprised that any of this happened. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that is prided in America these days is the ability to make money.
Also, there’s a reason a lot of people like films like “Fun with Dick and Jane” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”– we like seeing people get away with things.
None of this would have ever come to light if the book wasn’t selected as an “Oprah” book. I read somewhere that “A Million Little Pieces” was pretty unremarkable at first issue and only had a print run of something like 50,000 copies. I’ll bet anything the author wishes he could go back to those days.
BTW: It’s funny, I happened to watching the show the day Oprah announced AMLP as her club choice. What stands out in my mind was the fact that Oprah made a really big deal out of the whole thing. She had the author’s mother sitting in the audience totally unaware of everything and putting the camera on her when she made the announcement. I’ve been thinking of that particualr show all day and wondering how the mother feels.
Yeah, Weiner notes that Oprah never revolked the Book Club seal of approval. Now that Frey has told her to her face that he lied, maybe she will.
The thing that gets me is that the story was so good, even if it wasn’t true. Why didn’t they just publish it as fiction? I hear that Frey tried to sell it as fictional, but didn’t get a bite from a publisher until he changed the category to to memoir.
What a shame. I, too, feel a little duped. Except that I read for entertainment and rarely believe much of what I read as truth anyway. Especially if I don’t know the author’s reputation.