Nan A., hey hey, goodbye

Did anybody else notice that it was a website (thesmokinggun.com) owned by a cable TV network (Court TV) that exposed a so-called memoirist as an unrepentant liar (James Frey)? And that it was a TV personality (Oprah Winfrey) who finally summoned the million little doubts, expressed on Amazon.com and other sites over the past three years, and not only destroyed Frey on national TV yesterday, but may also have permanently damaged the career of his editor, Nan A. Talese of Doubleday?

And that the word that best describes this whole sorry matter was coined by a television personality: truthiness?

This isn't a corner of the publishing world I am remotely familiar with. As you may know, my wife wrote a book that we're publishing. We'll count ourselves lucky to get two prepublication reviews, whereas A Million Little Pieces got scores of them on the Talese name alone. The high end of the publishing biz needs television to keep those ridiculous sales levels up. It needs Oprah.

But what Oprah giveth, Oprah can taketh away. Boy howdy, did she on Thursday. Atoning for her defense of Frey on "Larry King Live," and then some, Winfrey admitted error and confronted Frey. Then came the real surprise. When Frey proved less than satisfactory in his apologies, she turned on his editor, Talese, who simply refused to admit that she did something very, very wrong in greenlighting Frey's memoir without so much as a fact check.

There is a rich irony in the fact that Nan A. Talese is married to Gay Talese, a man who is so scrupulous about details in his own reporting and contemptuous of celebrity authors who are "sloppy about facts."

Maybe that was Gay trying to reach Nan by cell phone yesterday (a ringer went off during the live broadcast of "Oprah"). Maybe he was calling to say: Dearest, you aren't apologizing enough!

Update: Jeff Jarvis bizarrely rants against Oprah, using an example that involves -- c'est coincidence! -- himself. How very Oprah.

Comments

[Barry]

Nan is to be praised that she kept her cool and didn't just walk off stage, as I would have. This was like a Jerry Springer show.