A Note on Links
More Essays by Milan
Speaking of Distraction
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Another Review of The Novel: An Alternative History
The Orange Eats Creeps
The Unconsoled and the Annihilation of Plot
Pwned. Say what you want about J-Franz, but he didn’t go out like this.
As should be common knowledge by now, last night Frey got worked on live TV by The Oprah. An Oprah scorned is nothing to fuck with.
Frey’s problem, which I supposed befits an addict, is that he just didn’t know when enough was enough. Proving the adage, it’s not the lie, it’s the coverup, he should have just stuck to his original story. But no, he had to go on Larry King and try to pretend like he was this great guy. When that didn’t work out as planned, Frey let himself be talked back onto Oprah. And then what happened?
I feel duped.
But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.
I sat on this stage back in September and I asked you, you know, lots of questions, and what you conveyed to me and, I think, to millions of other people was that that was all true.
The Oprah has spoken.
The little dude got his ass handed to him, and then what did he come back with?
"I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely," Mr. Frey said yesterday of the Smoking Gun report.
Nothing like admitting wholeheartedly and completely to the word of your accuser.
Oprah: 1, Doubleday: 0.
But fortunately, Doubleday publisher Nan A. Talese had a brilliant rebuke to Frey’s admissions that he lied his ass off.
"An author brings his book in and says that it is true, it is accurate, it is his own," Ms. Talese said. "I thought, as a publisher, this is James’s memory of the hell he went through and I believed it."
Oprah: 2, Doubleday: -1.
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! What do we need stinkin fact-checkers for? This slightly frightening-looking former addict comes to us with a memoir and he sez it’s true, so it’s true. Shit! Next thing you’ll be asking us to check the authenticity of Scotter Libby’s memoir.
If anything, this must make The Oprah feel a whole lot better about her book club. I imagine it must have stung to get worked by J-Franz, and I can’t really blame The Oprah for taking a personal time out for a while after. But you have to give her credit. She went back to contemporary authors, and right out of the gates she’s got another controversy on her hands. Does she fuck it up? Hell no. She applies the lessons of J-Franz, adjusts, and works Frey. Well done, Oprah.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Yea, way to go. Way to cover your ass, Oprah.
Did that show have anything to do with anything other than making Oprah feel better about herself?
(and, oh yeah, making her and her book club look like the victim here…)
Hell, I was duped…
Oh please. Say Scott, isn’t it time you picked yourself some harder targets?
It’s not Oprah or Frey it’s the genre. The “I was a fuck-up read my lame bio” concept should be rejected wholesle by the reading public. Explore authors who write not those whose only claim is to have screwed up.
Maybe Oprah is acting to save her brand, but whatever her motivation, she deserves credit for bringing a murky and often pretentious literary debate into a clean, well-lighted room and exposing the arguments to public view.
The result? The public has turned angrily on Frey, and scoffed at the publisher Talese’s position.
The idea that the book was the memoirist’s memory of what happened–essentially, this is his truth–has fallen flat and doesn’t look likely to get back up.
Will memoir writers now be judged by the same standards for fact as are biographers? If so, big trouble for the memoir genre, because for years now, in grad school and out, writers have been told that the exact details, the dialogue, etc., isn’t all that important. Besides, publishers don’t really care.
But if we see a lot fewer memoirs, that’s fine with me. I’m happy to go back to fiction. If I want to hear a lot of b.s. stories, all I have to do is go down to the local bar…
Yep, exactly, you’d have to change what the genre represents and that seems fairly pointless. Memoirs are always glamorized recollections in one way or another and at least people (should) know what to expect.
This may get lost in all the “horror of the lies” business however.
That said, Nan Talese sure bugs. She should just explain exactly what you’re describing rather than coming back with “it rang true to me, I once had a root canal without novocaine.”
As with most things, I’m sure it just comes comes down to money since supposedly Frey orginally pitched it as a work of fiction. Doubleday must’ve just figured they’d sell more copies of the thing marketing it as a memoir.
The amount of oxygen burned up over James Frey’s million little lies and Oprah’s reactions to him is great proof that Americans are the most over privileged people on Earth. If this is our biggest problem, then we don’t seem to have many serious ones left to worry about. From my own sampling of the media coverage, it seems that far more attention was given this week to Oprah and Frey than to King George’s continued dissembling about his incremental progress in chippping away at the Bill of Rights’ limitations on governmental power.
Polls say that he’s succeeding. More people than not approve of his illegal wiretaps and agree that anything done in the name of the phony war on terror is justified.
Naysayers should start assembling a little hobo kit for the day when the political concentration camps open their gates. Perhaps they will have TV there so that we can continue to watch Anderson Cooper, Larry King, and, of course, Oprah to continue to be apprised about what’s really important.
Can we all stop talking about Frey now?
The subject isn’t really that deep and it has been exhausted.
Let’s move on.