James Frey sentenced to Oprah Jail

James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, was on a live Oprah show today. Yeah, that's right, I watched Oprah. She also had Nan Talese, his publisher, and some journalists like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd.

Oprah was on the attack, accusing Frey of lying in his memoir, which he admitted, and accusing Talese of being a shoddy editor, which she seems to be. Talese made the good point, though, that there is a difference between memoir and autobiography. The former, by definition, is based in memory, while the latter is more exclusively based in fact. Still, Frey comes out of this looking like a lying bastard.

On Larry King (which I thankfully can't watch w/o cable), Frey admitted to lying on about 20 pages. On Oprah, it seemed like the majority of the book is fiction, at least in terms of, you know, facts and details and things. The most blatantly questionable part of the book, when he has two root canals without any form of painkiller, was brought up again. This time, he said that he's pretty sure he might have had those root canals and that he can't remember if there was or wasn't Novocain. In defending him, Nan Talese said that she'd had a root canal once without novocaine, so she didn't question his story.

Don't these publishing houses have fact checkers? Isn't that what the character in Bright Lights, Big City did for a living? Or was that for a magazine? I can't believe that no one at Doubleday thought to question any of that book. I'm glad Oprah went out and admitted she was wrong for supporting him, especially with her new selection, Night, which has been classified as fiction, incorrectly, by bookstores and schools.