Oprah on James Frey: "I Feel Duped"- Page 4

[DottieD'Luscia]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 10:09am

I'm curious; during the Larry King clip that was played repeatedly there was a woman sitting next to Frey, who was that? I might also say that she appears foolish as well because at that moment she was applauding Oprah's vindication of Frey.

[JerseyGirl2]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 10:11am

His Mother.

[Fantabulous428]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 10:21am

I found this on some AOL message board in response to yesterday's show, since it's been all over the "front page" of AOL news. I think it pretty much sums up what I was trying to say yesterday, but didn't really achieve since it was 2 am.

The whole show was just an attempt to make her look SO innocent and that she was SO taken advantage of, hence the mini clips of journalists condemning Frey. The show was designed so it made it look like Frey killed one of Oprah's relatives or something. Oprah lives off the image that she is a "good will queen" and does NO bad; if this is true, shouldn't she believe in second chances? I don't even think he did anything wrong. He changed some details...I understand the 87 day jail time detail was a big one, but these people who knew nothing about him or addiction were judging him and his life like no tomorrow, and almost doing it sarcastically.

So he lied about the way his friend killed herself. Who cares? The fact remains that she killed herself and that is all that matters. He was protecting his friend's identity and nobody has any business telling him how he wants to portray her death. Then you got Oprah's little slaves (the retarded audience) clapping at every single remark she made. She went way overboard and they were way too hard on this guy. And they brought SO many outside prospectives, yet they were ALL on Oprah's side. It was just terrible to watch and I'll never watch Oprah again. This man still has problems, and they didn't care, they just all praised Oprah. Ugh. Change it from a memoir to based on a true story and move on. I hope this guy doesn't relapse or attempt suicide over this. It was a very ugly display on Oprah's part.


I also wonder what is going to happen, or perhaps what is already in the process of taking place in terms of fact checking My Friend Leonard.

Updated On: 1/27/06 at 10:21 AM

[JerseyGirl2]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 10:31am

I just find it amusing that Oprah completely changed her tune once she started getting letters.

[Fantabulous428]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 10:35am

Yea, and she made it sound like she spent every free moment reading emails from her viewers.

[Plum]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 10:40am

Of course it matters that he lied. Look, I have a friend who killed herself, too, but I wouldn't glamorize it for the purpose of a memoir. People's lives don't fit neatly into stories, and memories can get blurred. So no one is expecting memoirs to be perfect, hyper-accurate diaries of years of living. It's the deliberate deception that stings for people. Narratives are just things we find believable, and which have a certain "truth" to us even if they didn't happen. But there's a reason we distinguish between fiction and non-fiction.

That said, there isn't a doubt in my mind this episode was all about the ritual cleansing of Oprah. Frey was just there to look bad next to her.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 10:53am

He was very well paid to sit there and look hangdog.

As I said earlier in this thread, Oprah's endorsement put an addition $10 million or so in his pocket, before the movie sale.

In response to Fantabulous's x-post from AOL: Frey was NOT just protecting his friend's identity. He was doing much more. To protect someone's identity, you simply change the name, you change the location, or you change identifying details, with the standard disclaimer that "Certain names have been changed to protect the innocent."

What Frey did was create a MORE COMPELLING dramatic climax. That is called "fiction writing." Nothing wrong with fiction but Frey presented it is "inspirational memoir": "I did all these things AND YOU CAN DO THEM TOO!"

That is called "hokum."

[TheQuibbler]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 11:09am

From a dramatic standpoint, I think slitting your wrists is more "dramatic" than hanging yourself. Isn't that what he changed (wrist slitting to hanging)? I don't think changing the way someone committed suicide is a huge deal. I started the book and was unaware that there would be spoilers on Oprah's show, so now I know all about Lily's death.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 11:50am

For the people who don't really care about the truth and are happy to settle for mere "truthiness," three words: WAKE UP. THINK!

Fantabulous and others, I'm certainly not a big Oprah fan. But criticizing one show done by a woman with her name on two TV shows, above movies and one Broadway musical title, her first initial and face on her own magazine every month, as being "for her ego" is a bit like criticizing clouds for not being solid. In other words, no kidding.

This show would not have happened if Oprah had not called in the Larry King Show with her usual self help blather about "the essence of James's book being what's important and its theme of redemption has helped THOUSANDS," which made the VERY BIG liar and his scary enabling mother beam beatfically. They got a call from The Oprah! She still likes us! Oh joy, SHE doesn't care that I made up six pages of the book!

The Oprah episode was designed for Oprah to publicly face the fact that she gave the VERY STRONG impression that the truth doesn't matter to her as long as "the essence" rings true. What was delightful was watching Frey squirm as he admitted that pages and pages (not just six by a long shot) were fabricated. Out the window went his "just a few pages mantra." The mother was nowhere to be seen. (And by the way, how complicit is SHE exactly as she sat next to the liar on Larry King and let her son lie some more????). I'd like to know what changed between the King appearance when he presented Set of Lies Number Two and the Oprah Show? What happened to make him first threaten The Smoking Gun in his butch man persona, having his lawyers intimate that they would be suing the web site, and the first words out of his mouth on Oprah's Show, "The Ssssssmoking Gun report wasssss pretty accurate." [Sorry, I take a certain queenly perverse delight when entitled frat boys who portray themselves as butch wild men for whom counseling is for pussies open their mouths and they sound like a sibilant Paul Lynde with huge nasality problems.]

But my real point after all these paragraphs is that some people here are willing to continue with the belief that every OTHER point in the book must be true or Frey would have said so on the Oprah Show? Why do people believe that???

A particularly good example is when Fantabulous wrote: "So he lied about the way his friend killed herself. Who cares? The fact remains that she killed herself and that is all that matters." There is absolutely no reason to believe that the fact remains that his friend killed herself. Conveniently, his "I changed identifying features" completely covers up the fact that there probably was no Lilly. He could barely make eye contact with The Oprah when he said, "Yesssss, abssssolutely, she killed herself." Oprah didn't pursue it because Frey has the kind of pathology that really WON'T admit he's a liar until presented with incontrovertible evidence that somebody else knows he's lying.

I know how hard it is to face the truth and let go of the illusions you had to maintain to believe a pathological liar. But believe me, this is not a man who completely "came clean."

And finally, Frey's automatic overuse of the word "Absssssolutely" on the King and Oprah shows. I just kept waiting for him to say "Fabuloussssss!" and get up and start dancing to The Pet Shop Boys.

Updated On: 1/27/06 at 11:50 AM

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 11:56am

"Get up and start dancing to the Pet Shop Boys."

Namo, you made me wee-wee myself a little, as usual.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 11:59am

"It's the bloody buggery Pet Shop Boys, darling."

"Bip bip bip, bop bop bop."

[erikaamato]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:01pm

Namo: Brilliant post. Couldn't have said it better myself.

TRUTHINESS SUCKS!

P.S. Hmmmmmmmm... I picture him dancing to Bronski Beat, myself...

[WindyCityActor]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:01pm

FindingNamo, I am now mopping coffee off of my computer monitor!

Marry me, a little?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:03pm

Oh honey, I was betrothed to you the day you showed your first picture of yourself on here!

[mominator]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:03pm

Once again we don't NEED Oprah to tell us what we should read.
Come on people we have our own brains, and many of us know how to use them. We don't need Ms.W telling us what is good for us.
OK off the soapbox....

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:19pm

I do love that Oprah encourages people to read, since there isn't much of a premium on reading in the US culture nowadays, from the President on down.

But what I REALLY wish, in my heart of hearts, is that she encouraged more critical thinking. Like, "Do you guys think this is possible?" I mean THAT'S when a "club" has a chance to be really educational.

Even around here I see it. People accepting highly unlikely scenarios presented in threads and just taking them at face value and responding to them with absolutely no critical thinking, because it "might" be true. It happened last night on a Very Serious thread here.

Why is it as a culture we do not value asking questions to find out if the truth is being told? Why is "truthiness" good enough? And why is somebody who DARES ask a question (even in a gentle way until somebody decided he/I had to be called on the carpet in the thread so that EVERYBODY could think he/I was just being mean?) held up as the bad person when he or she is engaged in a spirit of inquiry? Why is it bad or wrong to actually want to know the truth?

So I wish Oprah would introduce a critical thinking component to her study guides or whatever she does, because it would fly in the face of a culture and a government that works hard to prevent people from doing that.

[Jane2]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:26pm

Good going, Nam! But is it ok if I say the word fabulous?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:28pm

Absssssssolutely.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:29pm

I think there is already a lot of critical thinking going on in the publishing industry and at Harpo Entertainment, where this event looms much larger than it does to the general population.

I keep trying to draw a connection between James Frey and the thread that was deleted last night, but I can't articulate it. I know the same impulses are involved: the desire to believe in the misfortune of someone else. I don't know. Maybe I'm off base.

[Sing a Song With Me]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:34pm

Asking Oprah and her audiences to engage in critical thinking would probably result in the same reaction should Oprah ever cancel her "MY Favorite Things" show. Riots of fat women overturning shopping carts in the K-Mart parking lot and eating one too many White Castle burgers to drown their pain.

[Jane2]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:42pm

PJ, as for the thread deleted last night, I'm thinking it's just a case of "how dare anyone question someone on a topic as serious as death?"

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:44pm

REDACTED

Updated On: 1/27/06 at 12:44 PM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 12:52pm

So do I PalJoey and that's why I spent so much time explaining why I was asking questions. That's also why I wrote that very long and kept-me-up-too-late post that compared the now-deleted thread to the JT Leroy scandal, the Armistead Maupin Night Listener scandal, the Rosie O'Donnell Find Me scandal, the RENT girl Munchausen by Internet scandal, the BWW BrendanStryker is dead hoax, Angelbabe's recent "My brother is dying of AIDS it's really sad" thread, and of course big fat queeny liar James Frey's scandal.

People are willing to accept that things they read or are told "might be true" because it taps into some empathetic response that good people DO have. But this is also how people are taken advantage of, emotionally, psychically, and financially. I really wish I had saved that long post I wrote because I feel like I really laid out why I was interested in this as both an academic exercise, (it's REALLY a phenomenon when people participate in their own hoodwinking), and because I imagine I will find myself caught up in the same process again. And it was a good explanation.

So, my crime was that I asked a very basic question. The question was, "is there an obituary?" This is also a question any fact checker working on Frey's book could have and should have asked about the "identifying details changed" character (as he referred to her) of Lilly in his book. There's nothing WRONG with asking the question. Had the question I asked last night been answered with "yeah there's an obituary but I don't feel comfortable showing it," I might have been doubtful but it would have made some sense. Had the answer been "Sure, here it is, good question!" obviously that would have been that.

Instead there was yet another litany of reasons why there is absolutely no evidence that for the second time in a month, a young person who LOVED the RENT movie has suddenly died of AIDS related complications and somebody in their life is posting about it. Well, I do know a thing or two about the AIDS epidemic, and teenagers in the US do not make up a dying cohort. The RENT storylines took place in a different era (and by storylines I mean the stage and movie versions of the storyline). And they are very emotional and moving.

But today, if somebody in their late teens is allegedly dying of AIDS related complications, some questions need to be asked. Like, WHY?

I asked a few questions to get at some truth behind the story telling and I was pilloried by some (hi, Orangeskittles!), lambasted by others, but in PMs many of those people came to see what I was saying and went back and changed what they had posted in their excoriations of me in the threads.

I wish some more of the adults around here would model critical thinking skills so that all of us, young and old, could realize that asking questions is a good thing. That "because it might be true" may not be a good enough reason to go along with fiction masquerading as truth (again, shades of Frey and all those literary liars, many of whom exploited the youth with AIDS angle) so that people's emotions and god knows what else can be manipulated.

When I think of the one adult who just picked up the story line that the young man died of AIDS because he "performed in a show against doctor's orders" and ran with it and declared the person a "cool kid," I cring.

We have to be able to ask questions. There's nothing wrong with knowing the truth, no matter what it is. Our culture discourages people from thinking this way, (in some cases, going so far as to debate "intelligent design" stupidity). It would be great if there was a fearless spirit of inquiry everywhere, but BWW would be a good start.

Updated On: 1/27/06 at 12:52 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 1:07pm

Thank you, Namo. I wish that post had been saved. Maybe the moderators can unerase it.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 1/27/06 at 1:09pm

Yeah, I totally missed it. Sounds almost as good as the Colin Farrell sex tape.