Fiction Addiction: Oprah's Book Club and James Frey's A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
As Long As It Isn’t True: A Literary Scandals PodcastShow Notes
"He's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true..."
When Oprah Winfrey chose James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces for her book club in 2005, she had no idea the kind of monster she was about to endorse. This episode of As Long As It Isn't True investigates how large portions of A Million Little Pieces, which was originally marketed as a memoir, turned out to be wholly fabricated and completely false — and how Oprah held those responsible for it accountable live on her talk show.
Theme music is credited to Wendy Marcini, Elvin Vanguard, and Jules Gaia.
Instagram: @literaryscandals
Selected bibliography: • "A Million Little Lies," The Smoking Gun • "Picking Up the Pieces: How James Frey flunked rehab, and why his fakery matters," Slate • "How Oprahness Trumped Truthiness," The New York Times
More from As Long As It Isn’t True: A Literary Scandals Podcast
After a long hiatus, As Long As It Isn't True returns for season two. In 1958, Truman Capote published his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, which would go on to become one of the most beloved pieces of literature of all-time. It would inspire the equally beloved film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961, a film we're still talking about today. But Capote's inspiration for the character of Holly Golightly is a whole other story, as well as the flocks of women who started claiming they were the real Holly Golightly on which Capote based the character. Threats of libel lawsuits were made. But the true inspiration for Holly is something of a Freudian tale... Instagram: @literaryscandals Selected bibliography: • Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson • "Gay Pride Book: Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - the Novel That Saved My Life" by Jamie Brickhouse, HuffPost • Capote by Gerald Clarke
"The people who believe in these lists are asleep. Anyone sitting up at three in the morning secretly has doubts."
After her writing career as a biographer was destroyed by a book that tanked, as well as her off-putting personality, Lee Israel fell into poverty and began forging letters and literary documents of prominent 20th-century authors. She was so good at slipping into the words and minds of others that some of her forgeries even made their way into an early edition of a 2007 biography on Noël Coward. But like all good career criminals, Lee's success would come to an untimely end. She would tell her story in her 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, which was adapted into a feature film starring Melissa McCarthy as Lee — for which she would be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
“You can’t translate poetry into prose. That’s why it’s poetry.”
“Rapidly growing interest in the subject of homosexuality has made novels on this theme a big seller...”