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Oprah Winfrey, embarrassed by her defence of a memoir after it was exposed as partially fabricated, apologised and then lectured the sheepish-looking author and his publisher in an emotional hour of televised penance. Two weeks after standing by James Frey's falsified tale of crime and drugs, the talk-show queen reversed herself following a spate of newspaper editorials and columns assailing her credibility. "I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter and I am deeply sorry about that," Winfrey told viewers of her Chicago-based show on January 26. Frey, after an early series of maddeningly vague comments about "embellishments" and the subjectivity of memoirs, acknowledged for the first time that, in writing A Million Little Pieces, he systematically lied. The previous refusal of Winfrey, Frey and his publisher, Doubleday, to own up to the book's fictions sparked a national debate over whether facts really matter anymore in the hype-heavy literary world. In the 10 years since Winfrey formed a book club to endorse her favourite works. Frey's book was published in 2003, but since Winfrey endorsed it in September, the memoir has sold two million copies. Winfrey's tone was dramatically different during her Jan. 11 phone call to CNN's "Larry King Live,"' when she said that although some of the facts had been questioned two days earlier, "the underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me. And I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book." — LATWP |
