Just Ask Texas Cattle Ranchers
2 Comments Published by Michael on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 6:41 AM.
If there is a lesson for all of America, and the known world for that mattter, to learn it is that you should not mess around with Oprah. Ask cattle ranchers from a few years ago, and ask this guy, James Frey (right). Like the Wicked Witch of the West, who sends out her hord of flying monkeys to wreak havoc, so too has Oprah dispatched her minions to effectually discredit and utterly destroy an author.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that she is wrong to do this. In fact, I see the validity of her argument. She has become some sort of suburban-housewife's-beacon-of-hope-and-truth, and the trust that these followers have placed in her has been violated. Winfrey claimed that she was daily receiving emails from viewers who were inspired by the story of an addict struggling to get clean. She was hurt and embarrassed that these same viewers, due to some detective work from Smoking Gun, found out that Frey was in fact lying about large portions of his story.
This has caused me to think of two things:
1. Oprah has changed the face of reading in America - With her God-like powers she has somehow made reading cool and exciting to those that would probably not otherwise think so. For that I can never fault her. Who could have known that her book club would become this popular and have the power to both launch new authors into celebrities with her praise and destroy others by her ire. For this I have to admire her.
2. Truth has changed - There is a book I read in college called Truth Is Stranger Than It Used To Be. The book really has no direct correlation to the present subject, but the title keeps rolling about in my mind. Memoirs are by defintion something liking to the truth, but perhaps not anymore. Frey makes the argument that he can bend the truth to fit into the package of himself that he wants others to see. Perception becoming reality and truth. This is every philosopher's dream and every theologian's nightmare.
Let me share some clips from Oprah's interview with the author that were posted on CNN.com.
And even while Frey admitted altering information that he presented as facts, he maintained his book is a memoir."I don't think it's a novel. I still think it's a memoir," he said. "I don't feel like I conned you. I still think the book is about drug addiction and alcoholism and no one is disputing that I was a drug addict and an alcoholic, and it's about the battle to overcome that."
Among the facts he admitted to embellishing: he was jailed for only a few hours, not 87 days; and each character in the book wasn't wholly represented.
"Every one of the people in the book existed. I altered things about all of them," he said.
"And you altered things about yourself," Winfrey said.
"In order to get through the experience of an addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was, badder than I was. It helped me cope. When I was writing the book, instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image."
Call me old fashioned or narrow minded, but isn't truth by definition something that is reality? Otherwise it would be falsehood. Jesus himself is the truth (way, truth, life) and calling things true that are not is likening another god to the one true God. The road to God is a narrow little road, and the broad road is the same as embellishment (a lie).
Michael, I'm excited if you're going to start posting stuff like this. This is fun.
That looks like Ben Roethlisberger sitting on the couch with Oprah.