Poor Oprah

In the comments section of the last post, Barb said "And I hope Oprah feels like an idiot."

No such luck. Some choice snippets from this article, since it's probably going to try to force you to register before you can read...

"What is relevant is that he was a drug addict ... and stepped out of that history to be the man he is today and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves," Winfrey said Wednesday night in a surprise phone call to CNN's Larry King, who was interviewing Frey on his live television program.

And yet, one of the hallmarks of addiction--of any kind!--is dishonesty. So how far out of that history has Frey really stepped?

"Oh, but he did it for a good cause..." Even if he did fabricate for noble reasons--and I'm very skeptical of that premise--that doesn't make it right.

Frey, in his first interview since The Smoking Gun story came out, acknowledged he had embellished parts of the book but said that was common for memoirs and defended "the essential truth" of "A Million Little Pieces." "The book is about drug addiction and alcoholism," he said. "The emotional truth is there."

Now, quotes like this are almost enough to make me understand conservatives. Is Frey claiming that as long as some "emotional truth" is there, the factual truth doesn't have to be observed? And even if "embellishment" (and isn't that a nice euphemism?) is common practice among writers of memoirs, since when does that make it okay? That's the ultimate twelve-year-old's argument: "Everybody ELSE is doing it...." Again: that doesn't make it right.

Furthermore: there's a big difference between tweaking some minor details to add dramatic effect, and playing fast and loose with enormous chunks of reality. He fabricated most of his arrest record. How does that enhance the "emotional truth"? But it DID lend him an air of street cred, which the real facts would not have enhanced in the slightest; somehow there's not so much of the outlaw about five hours in a jail and a case of the chicken-pox, you know? The fabrication enhances an emotional LIE, not an emotional TRUTH; the reader is led to believe that Frey is tough, a criminal, incorrigible--when the facts are much less glamorously evil. He's not 50 Cent; he's Vanilla Ice.

And then there's his whole "paying tribute to people who died" allegation. How is it a "tribute" if you're using the deaths of two young girls, in which you weren't even tangentially involved if the evidence is to be believed, to build up your aura of "I'm a baad, baaaad man!"? The word for that is "exploitation", not "tribute". The family of this girl is far more patient than I would have been; had it been my daughter whose death was exploited in such a way, I would have been screaming for James Frey's blood.

I stand by my opinion of this whole situation. If you're an author or a publisher, and you're calling something "non-fiction", then it had better be NON-fiction--not "sorta-fiction" or "only-fiction-where-I-needed-some-drama". All the alleged good intentions in the world--saving drug addicts, memorializing the dead--don't make up for the fictions and the sins of omission. This book was framed as an autobiography, with all the tacit agreements between author and reader that the genre implies. When you read an autobiography, you expect the substantial truth; if the substantial part of the story is not true, what you have is a work of fiction. All the semantic niceties in the world don't change that, and I think Oprah would serve herself much better if she stopped trying to defend what James Frey did, and started a discussion of ethics instead.