2046 Oprah needs a session with Dr. Phil

says WaPo columnist Richard Cohen. Others are calling James Frey’s “memoirs,” A Thousand Little Lies. When you stretch a three hour prison visit waiting for a friend into a three month prison sentence, I’d say that’s a bit elastic for a definition of non-fiction, even by Mary Mapes standards for her wannabe National Guard story. It isn’t even “truthiness,” whatever that is, because everything that occurred during that three months just didn’t. Here’s a link to Cohen’s column, although because of my registration cookies, I don’t know if you see what I see. Sort of like Oprah’s judgment, innit?

“A mention of anything on her show will make a millionaire out of a pauper or, in the case of a writer such as the Frey the Fibber, a bestseller of undreamed proportions. The man became famous and rich on account of Oprah -- and, or so we all seem to believe, happy as well“

“The Smoking Gun Web site found out, for instance, that Frey had not spent three months in jail, as he wrote, but maybe a couple of hours or so waiting for a friend to post bond. His account of his stay in a treatment facility is questionable, as is his involvement in a train-car collision that took the lives of two teenage girls. These are not, as Frey keeps claiming, the usual tussle we all have between memory and fact, but veering departures from fact into fiction.”

“In this vast corporation [Doubleday, the publisher], there seemed to be no one who knew the difference between fact and fiction, truth and a lie. (Fiction packaged as fact is a lie.) Doubleday did not seem even a tad embarrassed that it had been snookered, that it had lent its considerable name and reputation -- built on the hard work of many an honest writer -- to a sham.”

The Smoking Gun website provides a fascinating read, especially since much of this was supposed to have happened in Ohio.

James Frey
Oprah