Oprah’s new exercise: backpedaling

  • Not a story I’ve paid a lot of atten­tion to, but I thought it was inter­est­ing that Oprah is now strik­ing an indig­nant atti­tude con­cern­ing the mess about “A Mil­lion Lit­tle Pieces.”

    It is dif­fi­cult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped … but more impor­tantly I feel that you betrayed mil­lions of readers.


    When a blog­ger broke the story that the sup­posed mem­oir of a rehabbed drug­gie was rid­dled with untruths, Oprah huffed that it was “much ado about noth­ing.” Which was stu­pid. She was putting her rep with all of her devo­tees up against the preva­lent notion that mem­oirs don’t belong in the fic­tion aisles of the book­stores. Remem­ber the “auto­bi­og­ra­phy” of Howard Hughes that turned out to be a hoax. If we use Oprah’s line of defense, we’d have shrugged about the decep­tion and read it any­way, because it prob­a­bly had at least some true facts in it. And the same might go for the sup­posed Hitler diaries.

    For what it’s worth, at the time I was curi­ous to read what some­one thought Hitler’s diaries would be like. But unfor­tu­nately for Oprah, the present ethos is what it is. If her author Frey “altered details about every sin­gle one of the char­ac­ters to ren­der them uniden­ti­fi­able,” as he now admits, his book isn’t a mem­oir, but an inven­tion. And for Oprah to want peo­ple to blur the two together just so her golden statue doesn’t get tar­nished is disin­gen­u­ous and dis­hon­or­able, to say the least.

    I’ve never been much of a fan. I just don’t get the whole Oprah thing. (I’m just try­ing to imag­ine how weird I’d have to be to let any­one pub­lish a mag­a­zine of my tastes, my inter­views, my recipes and my thoughts with my pic­ture on every cover and my first ini­tial as the name. That’s messed up, man.) But she has a lot of fans (and when I say “lot”, I mean it in the same sense that Abra­ham has a “lot” of descen­dants), and I think she let them down on this one. O, the shame.


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    January 26th, 2006 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 01.26.2006

    I’m actu­ally in the mid­dle of read­ing the book (it is my Book Club choice). I do think that there could be acknowl­edge­ment of his embell­ish­ments and poor choices (and trust me, from this book, he is the king of mak­ing poor choices) with­out a pub­lic upbraid­ing by Oprah. She’s dimin­ish­ing her­self by dimin­ish­ing him.

  • Grace

    It seems like a bit of a snow­ball effect. He should’ve been hon­est in the first place. But then Oprah should have under­stood that she couldn’t just wave every­body off with a “noth­ing to see here” atti­tude. And now … well, I’m prob­a­bly being a lit­tle unkind to say that she’s backpedal­ing. But I’d think if I were her, I’d real­ize that my cred­abil­ity is a lit­tle shaky on this. To start the “I feel betrayed” sort of thing just sounds a lit­tle insincere.

    But hey, if the orig­i­nal book can help peo­ple that much, I’m sorry that all this hap­pened to put peo­ple off it.

  • Mimi

    Yeah, I agree, it’s an awful cycle of blame and upbraiding.

    I agree, the book has helped a lot of peo­ple, and should be lauded for that, fic­tional or non-fictional.

    It’s painful to read, I’m skim­ming a lot.

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