2006 The most spectacular mea culpa in literature took place on this date, before an audience of some 50 million.
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club (OBC) had been launched ten years earlier, in September 1996. It was spun off from the hugely popular TV talk show hosted by the African-American (former film star) ‘personality’. ‘I want to get the country reading again’, Oprah declared by way of explanation.
There was predictable scorn from those who believed the country (or at least their part of it) had never stopped reading and needed no encouragement from a mere celebrity. As Jonathan Yardley, in the Washington Post, sneered: ‘I watched it once and nearly gagged on all the treacle and psychobabble.’ (5 November 2001)
The book trade did not sneer. Oprah’s inaugural selection, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s Deep End of the Ocean (a novel that had not set the Potomac on fire), sold close on a million copies overnight and shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The ‘Oprah Effect’, as it was labelled, proved to be the most potent advertising agent in the history of books. Every selection on OBC picked up between half a million and a million sales – irrespective of genre or quality.
Why? Not because Oprah claimed to be a literary critic but because the reading public trusted her (as they rarely do literary critics). Her most loyal audience were women of middle age, watching in their homes – traditionally a core book readership. Where Oprah led they would follow.
There was a clear tendency to Oprah’s selections (in which she had a guiding hand). She, and her advisers, manifested high-mindedness, a liking for ‘self-help’ books, and a strong ‘home-team’ rooting for African-American writers. Toni Morrison, for example, got no fewer than four picks in ten years (Oprah also bought the film rights to Beloved).
Ted Striphas, in his 2009 monograph The Late Age of Print, sees OBC as symptomatic of the changing cultural landscape in the 21st century, specifically that most fraught of marriages – TV and the Printed Page.
In 1951, at a time when there were around 12 million television sets in the US, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 pictured the spread of TV as the death of the book – which, henceforth, would be preserved only by a fanatically literate underground sect. OBC proved just the opposite. TV could actually expand the readership for books.
The most sensational of the OBC shows took place following Oprah’s endorsement of James Frey’s ‘drunkalogue’, A Million Little Pieces, in September 2005. The Oprah Effect boosted Frey’s (alleged) memoir of his descent into alcoholic hell and back into the number 1 slot on the New York Times bestseller list. It was, to date, OBC’s biggest-selling title. Oprah made Frey rich.
On 8 January 2006 the exposé website thesmokinggun.com publicised, in facsimile, Frey’s criminal record sheet and revealed that the book was, at best, a tissue of gross exaggeration and, at worst, fabrication.
Frey was hauled back on to the Oprah talk show, in front of a now-hostile live audience, on 26 January. Why, the ‘Empress of Empathy’ (Maureen Dowd’s description) asked, did Frey lie? ‘I feel duped’, she said (as the audience cheered), ‘but more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers’ (louder cheers, mixed with boos).
Frey, stumblingly, claimed that the ‘essence’ of the book was true. It was the Blanche Dubois defence: ‘In my heart I never lied.’ This would be his line in the months that followed. His publisher, Random House, took a more cautious line. They offered full refunds to anyone who honestly felt they had been misled as to the authenticity of A Million Little Pieces.
The event prompted a debate about ‘memoirist’s licence’, in which Frey continued to argue that ‘truth’ should not be hampered by what actually happened. Most of the contributors to the debate were unaware of the fact that they were waltzing around issues dealt with as the Mimesis paradox in Aristotle’s Poetics, a couple of thousand years before.
Some US libraries nervously reclassified A Million Little Pieces as fiction. The New York Times, after some dithering, continued to enter it in the ‘Fiction Bestsellers’ list. It had a new lease of life there. The Oprah Effect, even when accompanied by a damning critical verdict, worked yet again. There is, as book people like to say, no such thing as bad publicity.