Saturday, January 28, 2006

More Pieces

My apologies to those of you that are fed up with the James Frey scandal, but this is the last time I post about it. The other post or two is on my other blog, I'll get a link later. Probably not because I'm lazy.

Anyway, Slate has two solid articles on the Oprah "public scolding" show. The first by Troy Patterson is a spot-on review of the incident, personally speaking that is. I do give Oprah some credit for finally acknowledging Frey exaggerated a good deal of his memoir, but the move seems a bit disingenuous since it seems Oprah simply blamed Frey and his publisher for duping her. This is after Oprah publicly defended Frey from the TheSmokingGun.com allegations on Larry King Live.

The second piece, by Slate's Chatterbox, takes the publisher, DoubleDay's Nan Talese, to task. In 2003, Deborah Rybak published an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune questioning certain incidents in Frey's memoir. Rybak brought her inquiries to Talese who is quoted in the article. As Chatterbox points out, on Oprah Talese stated she had first heard about exaggeration allegations when TheSmokingGun.com came out with a report towards the end of 2005.

Anyway, once again my apologies on continuing to post about James Frey and Oprah and this entire scandal. This is the last one.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think primary blame here lies with the publisher, not the author. Frey wanted to sell his manuscript as a novel, and Doubleday refused. Instead, they had him make slight adjustments, and never did the requisite fact-checking prior to publication.

I feel that as a writer, I would be so desperate for a book deal that I would let a publisher market my novel however they wanted.

0000 said...

Yeah, now someone is bringing a class action lawsuit to Frey.

Our country is as drama-centric as a sodding highschool.

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