Oprah Winfrey:

Your involvement in the saga of James Frey has entangled me in personal confrontations. I am known as a reader among my circle, and over the last week I have been accosted at parties and gatherings and asked for my opinions. I politely begged off, knowing little of your program besides the generalizations gleaned from other media and a girlfriend who watches you when she should be working. I make excuses when the subject is breeched, for I have not read Frey’s book, nor do I care for literary spats that do not involve two writers pissing on one another in print.

The weekend has passed and I write to you having reflected on the situation. I have read the news accounts, I have read the transcripts. I have read the arc, and I have talked with those more knowledgeable of you and your program. I believe I have an understanding of the current situation, and I have wracked my terrible brain for memory of the incident four years ago when your name first came to my attention regarding literature.

I read Jonathan Franzen early in his career. The Twenty-Seventh City was a mind blowing book by a young author that got me to rethink modern American prose. City was huge effort of shenanigans and intrigue in modern day St. Louis, a city I could give a shit for prior to my encounter. City doesn’t hold up, but I was a committed Franzen junkie, for his second book, Strong Motion, was better and does sustain. That book gave me an urge for more Franzen books, and I had to put up with pedestrian though entertaining non-fiction of his in the New Yorker and Harper’s as I waited for more.

I purchased The Corrections months before its release. The advance copy was read over a weekend, and I was floored by its merit. For years I bought copies of City and Motion for friends and the response was lukewarm. I lent Corrections when I finished it, and men and women with stacks on their nightstands obliged me with that look of uneasy trepidation in their eyes, like one sees in a husband when told a mother in law is coming for an extended visit.

I was rewarded for my tenacity. Phone calls came at and after the breakdown hours of the evening, praising the book. I can’t believe how great this is; I’m reading it aloud to my wife; Amazing; etc., were along the lines of comments received. That book made me a seer of sorts in my pond, and I was a happy fish. Author worship is a foolish endeavor, but love of singular books is not. It was shortly after the book dropped on the public that both you and I learned this lesson.

Franzen’s renunciation of your endorsement was odd, and though I first empathized with him, I soon came to the conclusion that he was terribly ungracious. It was a shit move on his part. He was out of line and classes, his bravado more jejune than apt. Later on he offered his remorse, and your handling of the situation was humbling. You were courteous handling the slight. You took the high road and you rode it well. Your humanity was noble. You were noble.

Years passed and you selected a book by James Frey entitled A Million Little Pieces. You had Frey on your program and you praised him, and your audience praised him, and copies of his book sold well. Revelations broke that Frey misled readers, and at first you stood by him. You said something to the effect that Frey’s story still had meaning to you, and that is what counted.

Now you have reversed yourself. You have publicly chastised Frey for his shortcomings, and you have stated your remorse for defending him. I find your current actions deplorable.

You have chosen to demonize a book and an author you obviously care for because lonely housewives posted faux outrage on your message board, and a couple of jaded columnists have written critical of you. You had been accused of high crimes for your failure to admonish Frey and his book for its lack of truth. Since when has love of anything and the truth mattered at all?

True readers love books. They love everything about them, even their flaws. I am lucky enough to know a couple people who read well and often, and we can spar for hours over books we care for. The debate rarely contains words like Truth or Honesty.

You now have turned on both Frey and his book. Your comments and your about face have placated your followers. But what of you? What of your love for Frey’s book and story? I doubt that has changed; it doesn’t change if what you initially said was true.

I despise your actions. How strange of you to call out Frey and lambaste him, his publisher, and his talent (you judged his talent; you saw it had merit). The pandering to your in-studio crowd and couch-bound underemployed is beyond reproach. You want me to believe you are coming clean and telling the world how you feel? I don’t believe a fucking thing you say.

I’ve read thousands of books. Perhaps fifty matter to me. I’ve enjoyed many, hated a few, and most have left me flat. New books are a gamble readers take, and we at times rely on others for suggestions. Again, I’m lucky to know readers. Most aren’t, but one who watches your program does so for possibly the same reason one goes out into the world to gather with people; knowledge is social. I transmit the little I know to a good group of guys and dolls and we share. You have a different medium, powerful, but somewhat bleak for a jackass like me who doesn’t get the appeal. You share what you know to influence and affect. I supposed I do too, and when I am asked to reverse myself, when I am called on something by a friend’s influence and then investigate it, I take that with me, but never does it shake me from beliefs in art I enjoy.

An author mining his own or others experiences commits to paper ideas and circumstances that have nothing to do with the truth. This doesn’t mean non-fiction is lies, it simply means that any record that is not real time experience between parties present is bullshit. If it is well written, if it is entertaining, then readers benefit. There is a reason no non-fiction book on the 1920’s matters as much as The Great Gatsby and the reason is Fitzgerald was and always will be better than anyone writing of that time. Prose trumps truth.

Memoir, some say, is different. But it isn’t. Libraries and chain bookstores have divisions of books, NF, F, BIO, etc.. But the shops worth their salt put it all under literature; all that makes that grade, that is. Memoir is stylized bullshit. It is a modern phenomenon that youngish types who have done nothing but survived into their thirties write these books. Of course their stories are brazen and hyper; young men and women don’t have the experience to write of a noble life. They have what is considered market ready tales: my father died, my mother died, I drank when I was young, I was a lesbian, I sucked the president’s cock, I slept with my therapist, I was quirky, I never fit in, I was teased in gym class, my home was broken, I took drugs and had sex and drank and slept with a therapist who was really a man dressed as a woman who wrote criticism for the NY Review of Books. That’s what sells; that’s the shit memoirs have come to, and that is what you chose to promote. Frey entertained you, and now you want to destroy him.

You had courage sticking up for Frey, courage that you shucked for cheap sentiment, and you take a book and an author down in the process. You think you have come clean, but you aren’t telling the truth even now. I hope you are miserable over this.

Fuck you,

Mike Dabrasha

Oakland