Oprah Spins a Yarn

OPRAH SPINS A YARN

Aired on WNPR, "Morning Edition," March 30, 2006.

By now we are all familiar with Oprah Winfrey's public chastisement of author James Frey for the exaggerations and fabrications he sneaked into in his best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces. This confrontation came just four months after Oprah had chosen his true-life tale of drug addiction for her coveted Book Club list.

“Why did you lie?” asked Oprah, amidst the boos and jeers of the studio audience.

Here's the evidence: James Frey was not in jail for as long as he said he was; his friend committed suicide by slashing her wrists, not hanging herself; and he probably was given Novocain for a root canal procedure, even though he wrote that he was not.

Oprah paraded a few experts across her stage who declared that this brand of deception is a modern epidemic. According to one New York Times columnist, the reason these memoirists feel okay about being deceptive is because Enron is lying about profits and the government is lying about weapons of mass destruction. One AM radio talk-show host even insisted that it was Bill Clinton's fault. But contrary to what the “experts” claim, the problem of truth vs. falsehood in the memoir, or in any nonfiction personal narrative, is as old as the form itself.

When Frank McCourt was criticized for bending the truth in Angela's Ashes, he called his critics “begrudgers” and insisted that, anyway, his book is “a memoir, not an exact history.” Great American author Herman Melville's first book, a real-life travel story of the South Seas, was attacked by critics as “utterly incredible” and full of “monstrous exaggeration.” Melville had indeed changed the time frame of his adventure from four weeks to four months, and he freely appropriated names and descriptions from other books about the South Seas , but he maintained publicly that it was all true.

Critics have investigated and questioned the veracity of memoirs, biographies, and documentary works for centuries. So why wasn't Oprah correcting the experts when they said James Frey's deceptions were a symptom of present-day corruption?

When she initially defended A Million Little Pieces, Oprah said it was the “underlying message of redemption” that mattered, not the details. But a funny thing happened in the days between her defense of James Frey and her eventual attack. E-mails, letters, editorials, and articles overwhelmingly criticized the way Oprah dismissed the controversy. She had called the revelation of James Frey's fabrications “much ado about nothing”; did that mean Oprah was in favor of lying? Oprah was in obvious need of a makeover. Fortunately, makeovers are what daytime television does best. Without skipping a beat, Oprah dropped all her talk about underlying messages and larger truths, and she replaced it with the simple yet powerful rhetoric of the chastising mother. “Why did you lie?” she asked. “Why did you do that?” It didn't matter what James Frey said; this was no dialogue.

The irony of all this is that Oprah's sudden change of heart, ignorance of the history of memoir, and scapegoating of modern times are just as much fabrication as any of the questionable details in A Million Little Pieces. Like storytellers before her, Oprah spins a yarn to boost her own industry, to sell more magazine subscriptions, and to keep up her ratings.

In the end, James Frey loses his book deal and sinks into a pit of infamy, Oprah basks in the light of her latest media victory, and somewhere out there “the Truth,” murky and elusive as ever, steers clear of the entire episode.