Thank you, Austintacious.

It's cool for Dame Edna to call us Possums. But Heather, you're not old enough, campy enough, or cross-gender enough to try for something similar. If you are, prove it.

And please stop touting Battlestar Snoozactica. One prime reason for watching sci-fi is the gadgets, the battles, the conflict. The psychodrama? Not so much. And definitely not the grainy dream sequences that feel like a Nyquil flashback.

You couldn't have handled this better, Doubleday, if you'd planned every single step. Maybe you did. Author brings you fictionalized memoir, you market it as the hotter genre even while you know it's a fraud. It sells well. Oprah picks it up because she's a sucker for this kind of crap. It skyrockets. Doubts arise. You defend the author and the book. It keeps selling. Oprah to the rescue. More sales. OPRAH TURNS ON THE AUTHOR. Even bigger sales. Massive publicity. And the latest spin: Was Oprah mean?

If only the war in Iraq had been planned so deftly. . . . .

I can understand people feeling sorry for him--up to a point. He does look like a schoolboy called before the principle with his parents there, having to explain playing hookey or cheating on an exam or selling pot or whatever.

Having studied and written about shame, I understand that some people would vicariously experience his shame. Hell, even though I deplore his lying (forget the book--he lied in every single interview anywhere and lied after the lies were exposed), I felt embarrassed for him.

However, saying he was ambushed is just crap. Does anyone think he expected a love fest when he went on? That Oprah called and said, "Hey, could you come back to the show for a bit of follow-up? I'll tell you what it's about when we get there--don't worry. It'll be fun!" Puh-leeze.

Frey paid the price of being dumped on in order to sell another couple hundred thousand copies, which he will, because if he wasn't famous before, he is now. And he'll be even more famous when Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks plays him in the movie.

And look where the news cycle went next: Did Oprah hit too hard?

It doesn't get much sicker.

Forget feeling sorry for Frey, who did more than exaggerate or blur events: he flat out lied. Now, while he bathed in shame and humiliation for an hour, the firestorm about the book will keep sales going at an astronomical rate. It was an excellent investment of his time because tens of thousands of people who missed the book will now want to see what the scandal is about. And he is the perfect American anti-hero: he's been disgraced--can he find true redemption? Tune in tonight.

The real harm is deep. To save her butt, Oprah picked the revered Elie Wiesel's book Night as her next Book Club choice. She chose a Nobel Prize-winning author, but given the confusion over Wiesel's book (novel? autobiography? autobiographical novel?), she may end up casting doubt on the reality of the Holocaust itself. It's deeply disturbing that Wiesel's book will follow Frey's: the two may blur together for readers and non-readers, and fuel the Holocaust deniers: "See, Oprah picked one book full of lies, so how can we trust what's in the next one?"

I was nuts for 18th century fiction in college. Smollett, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne--though I confess Richardson was too serious for me. For years I felt like a cult member seeking others, and, say, finding out a new friend loved Humphrey Clinker was like reaching an oasis in the cultural/social desert. I've gone far afield within those authors: Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, et al. But Tristram Shandy is still a favorite and I've read it twice. His digressions circle around but he always gets to his strory, such as it is, sooner or later. Be assured! It's witty, deeply experimental (Jonathan Safran Foer rips off some of its devices, assuming correctly nobody's read the book), and a whole universe in itself, the way best fiction is. I found Sterne's humor very inspiring as my own writing career set off soon after college and enjoyed returning to him.

Having co-authored some books on shame, I think that addiction memoirs, like addiction itself, are rooted in shame. Frey presented an ultimate bathing in shame which many people found cathartic. He had hit rock bottom--vomit on flights, suicidal girlfriend, lying on the loor at Hazleden etc. etc. etc. But he supposedly came out of it.

However, Oprah felt shamed by her wholehearted endorsement not just of the book, but of the man under fire. So of course she struck back and had to publicly humiliate him. Also of course, the experience made some people ashamed, as Hillary Frey clearly is in her article. When you watch Hester Prynne with her scarlet "A," you may feel superior to her, but you may also feel equally flawed and exposed.

Despite all that, Oprah goofed. She had all the wrong guests on. She should have had memoir writers and people who edit 4th genre journals on talking about the nature of memoir. Now that would have been contentious, as opposed to a team tackle. Why? because there's a real split in the field between those who think the memoir should be like history--absolutely true to the facts--and those who belive it can only approximate them.

That's too subtle for Oprah, and would not have served her aim of shaming Frey for shaming her.