Oops, in the above post I mean of the Larry King show - was it the one where she phoned in, or was there a different one I didn’t see?
Heh. So something made Oprah squirm.
Good.
Even if she did dance around the issue in the Larry King call and couched it in terms of discouraging effect on those who had found inspiration in the book, what happened out in the Land Of Perception, where she lives or dies, was that she came across as if saying “the facts don’t matter if the point is valid”. That cannot stand, and she realized it.
Anyway… well-deserved million-dog pile-on on the author and everybody up and down that food chain. As to Nan Talese having to just take it from Oprah, well, that shows the power relationships involved. Oprah can get away with anything. Or so it seemed…
No, it was the one where she phoned in. She was supportive of him at that time, saying that the ultimate message of the book was what was important and that this message was still intact. Now, after having come in for a huge backlash from her fans, she did a 180 and hammered him on her show.
The poor guy wrote a book he thought would be an interesting read and submitted it as fiction to a lot of publishers. Most rejected it. Then along came a publisher who would publish it but wanted to change the classification to non-fiction. He wanted to get it published and agreed…undoubtedly seeing no great harm in doing so.
Then lo and behold, Oprah endorses it and has him on her show, where he perhaps reluctantly plays along with the charade that the publisher started. What was he to do…stab the publisher in the back and state there on her stage that the publisher changed the book’s classification and that no one should take it seriously? Of course not. So he continued to play along and all was well until the Smoking Gun got wind of it and blew the whistle.
Seems I’m not the only one. NYers love an underdog.
Anyway, I never thought I’d hear The Smoking Gun being cited as a source on live TV. It’s a bit like when journalists quote Internet forums or blogs- something I still have to get used to (and probably not the best thing to combat this whole “truthiness” issue).
So it was the publisher’s decision to market it as non-fiction, not Frey’s?
I thought Frey shopped it around as fiction and when nobody was interested, he started calling it a memoir.
Ahh, then I misunderstood her completely. I had thought she was just trying to make sure the people who were inspired by the book she remain inspired, and not turn back to drugs/alcohol/violence, and in refusing to praise Frey, she was (in my eyes) not very happy with him. I figured her publicist or whoever told her for the time being to hold her tongue about how she felt about him personally, because I had told Mr. Stasaeon that night, “Damn, she doesn’t like him very much, does she?”
Went right over my head. Again, though, like I said, I have no dog in this fight, not being a fan of either one of them. I just misunderstood. When I heard she had a show that bashed him, I wasn’t surprised, because I walked away from that Larry King show thinking she was seething underneath her carefully formulated replies. :smack:
I look for things where there are no things sometimes. Carry on. 
That’s my understanding based on what I’ve heard mentioned on a couple of t.v. talk shows. I don’t recall exactly where I heard it and don’t have a cite, so in light of what you’ve heard I guess it would probably be best to take it with a grain of salt until an authoritative answer comes along.
Not the version I saw. On the Larry King show, she was very careful in how she chose her words – she stood by the book, not the author. It wasn’t a defense of Frey, but of the message of the book and why she chose it. It was commentators and fans who interpreted it as her standing by in support of the author.
I didn’t see the stoning on the Oprah show, and I don’t plan to, since I’d feel uncomfortable seeing even someone I hate getting such a pile-on. But I’ve read recaps, and what Oprah was doing wasn’t a 180 so much as a clarification of her position. I don’t care much about Oprah Winfrey one way or the other, but it’s not fair to blame her for taking a position she didn’t.
And he reluctantly talked in interview after interview after interview about how important “The Truth” is. And reluctantly promoted the hell out of the book and presented himself as a survivor through the sheer force of his own will. And reluctantly wrote a sequel. And reluctantly secured a very profitable deal for the movie rights and wrote the screenplay. And reluctantly gloated about his lucrative movie deal on his blog (which is now made private).
Poor guy.
Oprah might not have really stood by Frey, but I don’t blame commentators for interpreting her statements that way. She called the controversy “much ado about nothing.” Perhaps she was intentionally lawyerly about it, because you’re correct that she never quite reaches out to support him as far as I can tell. But she also dismissed the story. I think she probably felt that, because she’s Oprah[sup]TM[/sup], she shouldn’t or didn’t need to acknowledge the truth about the situation [he’s a fraud] because it would hurt her image. The response to her comments, I guess, made her realize she was wrong, and that it was better to be upfront about it.
Yes, that’s correct. But how does that differ from what I said? She stated to King that she felt the essential message of the book remained and that the books message was what was important.
If you’ll recall, Frey smiled and his mother clapped her hands in delight at Oprah’s words.
Oprah’s show is replayed here every night at 11:05 and I just watched it. It wasn’t as bad as you might have thought, although I’ve never seen Oprah so phony and hypocritical as she was on this show. She kept assailing Nan Talese for not intuiting that elements of the story were false, and she absolutely would not accept Talese’s explanation that these elements didn’t strike her as being false when she read them…this despite the fact that Oprah obviously believed them quite wholeheartedly herself.
Well, given that the publisher apparently decided to promote it as a memoir (more on this in a sec, AuntiePam) what would you have expected him to do? All of this was prior to the scandal and he was a writer happy to have his work published and selling. So far as I know, most writers are expected to promote their books. And most fledgling writers would be happy to write a sequel if their publisher wanted it. Further, I suppose I would gloat myself if I wrote some funky little book that I didn’t expect much to come of and all of a sudden Oprah Winfrey endorsed it and it became multi-million seller and people were clamoring for a sequel and to make a movie of it. Remember, all of this was prior to the ensuing scandal and he probably just thought that this was the way things go when you write a book that becomes widely accepted.
I’m not really taking up for the guy so much as I’m just trying to say that he may not necessarily be the deliberate con man people are trying to make him out to be. Rather, I think he just wrote what he thought was a good story which would be read by a modest number of people and then fade into obscurity. Then Oprah discovered it and made the book and its message a cause celeb, and he had little realistic choice but to go along. Then when the Smoking Gun exposed the book’s inaccuracies and Oprah was put on the defensive, he came to be perceived as a guileful and deliberate con artist, and I simply don’t think this is the case.
And AuntiePam, Oprah asked Nan Talese who was responsible for the book being published the way it was. Talese, dancing on the head of a pin, responded: “When he brought the book to me, I read it as a memoir.” This tends to substantiate in my mind that it was the publisher’s (her) decision to market it that way. There is also this from CNN’s entertainment page:
'When asked by King about the rumor the book had been turned down as a novel by several publishers, Frey said yes, it had, and it also had been turned down as nonfiction.
“We initially shopped the book as a novel, and it was turned down by a lot of publishers as a novel or as a nonfiction book,” Frey said. “When Nan Talese purchased the book, I’m not sure if they knew what they were going to publish it as. We talked about what to publish it as. And they thought the best thing to do was publish it as a memoir.”
The implication of this (or perhaps my inference) is that it was finally published as a memoir, because … memoirs sell. In other words, it was a marketing decision.’
This makes me think that Frey and Doubleday worked together to try to determine how best to market the book with Doubleday having the final say.
That may be true. The question then would be ‘how did Frey represent the book when talking to Doubleday?’ I watched the last 10 minutes of Oprah, give or take, and Frey seemed to say in his final remarks that only two things in the book were untrue - one was that there was one person with him when he left rehab, not two, and I forget what the other was. If I heard him right and he doesn’t feel that the bit about being wanted in three states, being in jail for months and all the rest of it was untrue, I don’t reserve much blame for Doubleday.
Well, he is certainly engaging in his share of equivocation. Whether this is indicative of his true mindset or merely damage control vis-a-vis industry damage and/or lawsuits is open to question. I thought Nan Talese’s careful wording was telling, however. She very carefull said she read it as a memoir; meaning to me that she felt the story was more readable and enjoyable as a memoir, so that was the way she was gonna go with it. Further, the book probably worked its way up to her through various underlings and by the time she got it the question of its being fiction or non-fiction was probably moot, as she apparently felt that she was the proper one to decide what it was.
Frankly, I think Frey has been doing a lot of falling on his own sword in an effort to minimize damage to both his publisher and Oprah. Whether this will pay off for him in the long run in terms of publisher loyalty and Oprah’s good will is hard to say, but I think he’s doing the right thing by taking the blame himself and not trying to shift blame onto Doubleday where it most likely belongs.
Yeah, I’ll have to do my own back-pedaling here, as I didn’t see Oprah’s show. And it should be obvious to me that she wouldn’t have used it as a topic if she didn’t think she’d implied support of the author. It’s really hard to feel sympathy for anyone involved – from the Anderson Cooper show about it, everyone from Oprah to Nan Talese to even the Smoking Gun writers came across as weasely and self-serving.
Tell the truth. Just once, in the past three years, to actually tell the truth about the book. He had a million (little) chances to gracefully get out of the situation and avoid the “controversy” that resulted from it. Instead, he just kept digging his hole deeper.
I’m not saying he’s a con man, either. Con men are supposed to be clever, and I haven’t seen anything that suggests he’s more than an over-privileged no-talent hack who wants to make himself out to be a bad-ass.
I think you’re going way too far in portraying him as a modest writer caught up in a flurry of media attention. He may not have orchestrated the whole thing, but he sure as hell capitalized on it. Sure, fictionalized, “semi-autobiographical” memoirs get published all the time, but their authors don’t usually make such a huge deal about how they’re champions of “the truth.” About how they’re opening up their lives to you, warts and all, because that honesty can help them through tough times.
If it were just some guy who’d over-dramatized a few details here and there, I doubt there would’ve been so much attention, Oprah’s Book Club or no. The problem is that the stuff he lied about is the stuff that he based his whole persona on. It didn’t stop at one book – it kept growing to sequels and movies and countless reviews and interviews, and not once did he concede that the book was anything other than “basically true.” When he got called on it, he sued the Smoking Gun and gave the very literary response “Let the haters hate.” It was only when he was confronted with the wrath of Oprah that he finally admitted that it was fiction.
All that said: I’ve never read the book, so my opinion is entirely based on reviews, articles, and interviews I’ve seen.
Exactly.
Is there a published report of Frey shopping his book as fiction & getting turned down? Did he admit this to the big O yesterday? I’ve heard this as well, but only in conversation. In the articles I’ve read on the subject, this seemingly huge fact tends to get left out.
Agreed. While I liked the book, and did not take it as “pure fact” while reading it (long before the story broke), I am unfazed by the quasi-scandal. Everyone involved appears to have some self-serving motive, but I will feel a small hint of pleasure when the tool from the smoking gun has his sordid past publicized… I justhave an inkling that he is a phony who preaches one thing and practices another…
For what it’s worth, the sequel is classified by Borders as Fiction. And that was before the scandal.
And Frey does admit that he had tried to sell the book as fiction. Being such a stalwart for the truth he then tries to pretend that he didn’t know whether it was being published as fiction or fact.
I have no sympathy for Frey- I don’t think anybody would have cared if he’d said he was in jail for 87 days when it was really 64 or if he had done the usually “names and identifying details have been changed” thing or even fudged on some chronology issues within reason, but he made the whole damned thing up and needs to take his medicine instead of weaseling around with “it’s sort of true… it’s autobiographicalish… the substance is true… I really did smoke crack…”
I haven’t always been a huge fan of Oprah (I think she’s a brilliant person and has done a lot of good but she’s way too self-important and self-indulgent for my taste). But I have to say that I really sincerely respect her apology.
That is an actual honest-to-God apology complete with admission of culpability and poor judgment. She actually says “I was wrong”. I thoroughly respect that and wish that more public figures (or non-public ones, for that matter) could do that- just say “I was wrong”. She is an incredibly busy woman and so is her staff- I really don’t blame her for not having facts checked on a memoir that was already a bestseller- I think it’s quite legitimate and reasonable to assume the publishers did that to some extent or that the guy has some integrity to begin with. But I admire the fact that unlike Frey or other celebrities and ministers and thegodsalone-know-how-many-political-figures-of-all-parties-and-nationality she actually takes responsibility and says “I did something I shouldn’t have and I wish I hadn’t and I am sorry”. Nothing about her weight at all intended when I say “that’s what makes her a big person and a big star”. Brava, Oprah, Brava!
According to this Newsweek article, Frey tried to sell the book to various publishers as a novel, didn’t get any takers, and then started shopping it as a memoir at the suggestion of his agent.