'You betrayed millions'
Associated PressOprah Winfrey rebukes embattled author James Frey in front of a live audience only two weeks after supporting his disputed memoir.
Published January 27, 2006
NEW YORK - In a stunning switch from dismissive to disgusted, Oprah Winfrey took on one of her chosen authors, James Frey, accusing him on live television of lying about A Million Little Pieces and letting down the many fans of his book about addiction and recovery.
"I feel duped," she said Thursday on her syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show. "But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers."
Frey, who was booed in the same Chicago studio where he had been embraced not long ago, acknowledged he had lied.
Winfrey, sometimes angry, sometimes tearful, asked Frey why he "felt the need to lie." Audience members often groaned and gasped at Frey's halting, stuttered admissions that certain facts and characters had been "altered" but that the essence of his book, promoted as a memoir, was real.
"I don't think it is a novel," Frey said of the book initially offered to publishers as fiction. "I still think it's a memoir."
The broadcast marked an abrupt reversal from the cozy chat two weeks ago on Larry King Live when Winfrey called in to support Frey and label alleged fabrications as "much ado about nothing."
"I left the impression that the truth is not important," Winfrey said Thursday. "E-mail after e-mail" from book supporters had cast a cloud over her judgment, she said.
Her apparent indifference to the book's accuracy led to intense criticism, including angry e-mails on her Web site.
On a segment of Thursday's show that also featured the book's publisher, Nan A. Talese of Doubleday, Frey was questioned about various parts of his book, from the three-month jail sentence he now says he never served to having dental surgery without Novocain, a story he no longer clearly recalls.
Winfrey said that her staff had been alerted to possible discrepancies, only to be assured by the publisher. "I'm trusting you, the publisher, to categorize this book whether as fiction or autobiographical or memoir," she said to Talese, an industry veteran whose many authors have included Ian McEwan, George Plimpton and Thomas Cahill.
Talese told Winfrey that editors who saw the book didn't raise questions and that A Million Pieces received a legal vetting. She acknowledged that the book had not been fact-checked, something many publishers say they have little time to do.
Also on the show to discuss the controversy were several journalists, including Roy Peter Clark, vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which owns the St. Petersburg Times.
In a statement issued later Thursday, Doubleday, which initially had called the allegations not worth looking into, said it had "sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished."
It said an author's note would be sent to booksellers for insertion into current editions and that future printings would be delayed until the note can be included. But no text changes are planned, and the book will remain classified as a memoir.
Winfrey did not unleash publishing's version of the death penalty on Frey: revoking her book club endorsement, something she has never done.
Winfrey's selection made Frey's book a million-seller and the author, who came on the scene as publishing's latest bad boy, a hero to many who believed his story was theirs.
"In order to get through the experience of the addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was and badder than I was, and it helped me cope," Frey said on Winfrey's show. "And when I was writing the book, instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image."
Frey has a two-book deal with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, with a novel about contemporary Los Angeles due in 2007.
In a statement Thursday, the publisher said it has "very serious issues" with another Frey book presented as a memoir, My Friend Leonard, which refers to the jail term he never served. Regarding his two-book deal, Riverhead said, "The ground has shifted. It's under discussion."
Frey's saga comes at a time when the work, and even the identities, of such alleged hard-luck authors as J.T. LeRoy and Nasdijj have been questioned.
LA Weekly reported Wednesday that the award-winning Nasdijj, who says he's of Navajo descent, may be a white writer impersonating an Indian.
Citing documents and interviews with scholars, Indian authors and his acquaintances and colleagues, the alternative weekly magazine alleged that Nasdijj is really named Timothy Barrus and is a writer of gay and pornographic literature.
E-mail messages sent to Nasdijj and wife Tina Giovanni were not returned. No phone listings were found.
Ballantine, which released Nasdijj's last two books, said in a statement that it was "looking carefully at these allegations. . . . If in fact they are true, we would be very distressed to have published memoirs that may be deliberately inaccurate."