Oprah’s anger fails to derail memoir’s sales
Date: Tuesday, January 31 @ 00:00:00 UTC
Topic: Black Habits Articles


(METRO TORONTO NEWS SERVICES) Book moves briskly despite author’s admission of lying

Once again proving true the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, disgraced author James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is selling strongly in the wake of Thursday’s public condemnation of his fabricated memoir on Oprah, People News Online reports.

As of yesterday morning, the title remained No. 4 on the Amazon.com bestseller list — the same position it held before Oprah Winfrey told a shell-shocked-looking Frey live on the air that not only did she “feel duped, but, more importantly, I feel you betrayed millions of readers.”

At one point early in the interview, Frey said he still viewed the work as a memoir, not a novel. By the show’s end Winfrey made him admit he lied.

“This hasn’t been a great day for me,” he said. “I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to ...” “Lying,” Winfrey interrupted.

“To lying,” he said. “It’s not an easy thing to do in front of an audience full of people and a lot of others watching on TV. ... If I come out of this experience with anything it's being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure I don’t repeat them.”

Sitting with Frey in side-by-side easy chairs, Winfrey quizzed the author point-by-point about his book that described his drug-and-alcohol addiction and the people hurt by it.

“All the way through the book I altered details about every one of the characters,” Frey said, to disguise true identities.

He spent two hours in jail, not 87 days, and the account of his breaking up with a woman who later committed suicide happened in a much shorter period of time, with their separation occurring while he was taking care of personal business in North Carolina, not while he was in jail, he said.

She committed suicide by slashing her wrists, he said, not by hanging herself. Asked if The Smoking Gun website, which first questioned the book, had accurately characterized the discrepancies, Frey said: “I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate,” adding they did “a good job.”





This article comes from Black Habits
http://www.blackhabits.com

The URL for this story is:
http://www.blackhabits.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=138