The Big O is obviously a David Chase fan. After roasting alive former drug addict and publishing sensation James Frey on her show***—ostensibly because his “memoir” A Million Little Pieces (which she had previously pitched to millions of her faithful) contained outrageous exaggerations and boasts and because he was a “liar”)—
Oprah pulled him aside and said, “I know [her treatment of him on the show] was rough, but it’s just business.”
It’s just business?
Is that any way for Our Lady of the Afternoon to talk?
Curiously, this revelation about Oprah’s Sicilian m.o. comes some 18 months after the fact, from O’s new nemesis, Frey’s editor Nan Talese, who apparently didn’t take to being sandbagged on television and is still on the warpath:
“I’m afraid I’m unapologetic of the whole thing,” she said. “And the only person who should be apologetic is Oprah Winfrey,” who she says exhibited “fiercely bad manners – you don’t stone someone in public, which is just what she did.”
Earlier this week, Gawker nailed Talese for being ignorant of How We Live Now:
Wow, Nan is right about everything—except, of course … saying that “you don’t” stone someone in public when in fact “you,” if by “you” you mean any American televised entertainment, basically does nothing but.
Indeed, Talese does give the impression of inhabiting Mount Olympus, which apparently hasn’t received a television signal in, oh, the last two decades or so:
She described the Oprah audience as “holier-than-thou” and discussed being on the show as Mr. Frey amended his account of one character’s suicide.
“Oprah kept saying, ‘Did she kill herself? Did she cut her wrists?’ And he said, ‘No, she hung herself.’ And the whole audience went, ‘Boo! Boo!’ It was like being in the Roman circus. And after I said to them, ‘The tragedy is not how she killed herself, it’s that she killed herself,’ they all looked like a treeful of owls – no expressions at all.
Seriously, this woman hasn’t been connected with reality for quite some time.
Andrew Sullivan certainly isn’t impressed:
The publishing industry is one of the shallowest, dumbest and most archaic in the U.S. No one edits anything. The publishers do not care what is in their books and neither, by and large, do editors. If you want further evidence of this, listen to Nan Talese excoriate Oprah Winfrey for daring to expose a fraudulent book “edited” by Talese. Is Talese ashamed? No. Does she still have her job? Of course. It made money, and the people running the publishing industry have no other values but mercenary ones. Oh, and “buzz”.
Eric Alterman takes Andrew Sullivan to task for being an ungrateful slob:
Maybe Andy’s editor sucks. Maybe he hates Nan Talese. But does that give him the right to slander everyone in this deeply underpaid and underappreciated business?
Kevin Drum smells a rat in Sullivan’s vicinity:
It just so happens that I own four copies of The Conservative Soul (don’t ask), and turning to the acknowledgments I see that his editor is practically the first person he thanks. Was this heartfelt? Inquiring minds want to know.
Me? I’m just enjoying the headlines on Google News:
Nan Talese Is On an Anti-Oprah Rampage
James Frey’s publisher rips Oprah Winfrey’s “sanctimoniousness”
Editor of Controversial Memoir Criticizes Oprah for Bad Manners
James Frey may be a liar, but Oprah is rude, says Nan Talese
I’m with Gawker:
I appreciate Oprah’s point of view: she’s got her finger on the pulse of America. The only thing is this: even if Nan Talese sounds impossibly elitist when she describes the Oprah show as a Roman circus, she’s right.
Only she doesn’t go far enough: our entire public life, as reflected by the media and underscored by the blogosphered, is a circus.
She can’t just be figuring this out.
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*** Oprah vs. Frey was the subject of my first blog post.
I feel deeply ambivalent about Oprah, whom I’ve referred to as the undisputed queen of infotainment. Perhaps not coincidentally, Oprah also figured in my second post, in which I quoted Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, who was writing in the New York Times Magazine in 1996:
In my youth, the noble exercise of living was to strive to be authentic and aware, true to oneself and to one’s experience lucidly observed. Nowadays, anybody can make copy by saying she reinvents herself — she isn’t on Wednesday what she was on Tuesday and nobody will trace the continuum….
Oprah reinvents herself: fat/skinny/fat/skinny. And we are invited to watch, and to share the tears. (Like a statue of a saint, she weeps. All performances public. All tears designed to heal.) Fonda reinvents herself as well. From Ho Chi Minh to No Pain No Gain to Consummate Trophy Wife (with cookbook). Stewart reinvents and multiplies her mediums (magazines, TV shows, cookies, cookie cutters and as many varieties of tulips as would occupy a forgotten football stadium, all stamped with her own copyrighted logo)….
The carryings-on of these behemoths are inescapably interesting to us because they do what they do for the reason we all do what we do: they want, as most of us do, to escape the end game and to find sustenance in the desert.
