Letters to the Editor
-
Beat On the Head With the Book Club
What's shameful here is the lack of literary knowledge or context shown by Oprah or any of her readers. Oh my God! A literary memoir that's full of exaggeration and questionable facts. Yeah, that's never happened before.
Imagine Oprah's absolute mind-bending horror when she picks up books like "The Autobiography of Ben Franklin" or Mark Twain's "non-fiction." I reckon she'd be SHOCKED! DISILLUSIONED! BETRAYED! to find that there's a little more than 100% Gospel Truth going on between those covers. And while poor pathetic Frey ain't by any means Twain or Franklin, just picture those authors on her show, as Oprah lectures them about "truth."
Anyone who's "outraged" or "betrayed" when they find that a memoir writer didn't tell them the full truth is sort of like a guy who's so much of a rube that he cries into his pillow for two weeks when he discovers that David Copperfield doesn't really have supernatural powers and doesn't really make the Statue of Liberty disappear.
If you want an attempt at objective facts, read a historian. As for anyone who trusts a memoirist in the first place as anything more than a somewhat more self-obsessed novelist, well, I've got some nice swampland in Florida for sale. It's good land-- my family had a successful farm there for years and years. You can trust me about that, and I know you will: It's in my memoirs.