Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [158]
In November 2001, a month after his disinvitation by Oprah, Jonathan Franzen won a National Book Award for The Corrections, and a few months later she decided to discontinue her book club. Our Lady of Literacy had had it. “It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share,” she said. “I will continue featuring books on The Oprah Winfrey Show when I feel they merit my heartfelt recommendation.”
If she appeared overly sensitive to public criticism, it was because she had become accustomed to getting perpetual praise from the press—laudatory profiles, admiring interviews, adoring cover stories. With the exception of the tabloids, the U.S.S. Oprah sailed mostly smooth seas. Now she had hit a little turbulence over her lack of literary taste, and being derided as Our Lady of the Lowbrows had nicked her in a vulnerable spot. Never particularly proud of her education from the historic black college of Tennessee State University, she felt inferior around her Ivy League contemporaries. She knew her success and celebrity lifted her into most social circles, because, as she said many times, money opens every door in America. But the one marked “High-Art Literary” seemed to have slammed shut on her.
Oprah gave the publishing industry ten months to miss her book club before she announced that she was bringing it back. This time, though, she made herself immune to literary attacks by concentrating solely on the classics. For the next two years she rallied her viewers around some of literature’s finest writers:
2003–2005
49. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
50. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton
51. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
52. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
53. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
54. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck
55. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
56. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
57. Light in August, by William Faulkner
By 2005, America’s literary community was starving. More than 150 writers, mostly female novelists such as Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and Jane Smiley, signed a petition to Oprah, saying “the landscape of literary fiction is now a gloomy place.” They begged her to come back, and she agreed because she said she missed interviewing authors about their books. Interestingly, all of her next selections were books by men.
2005–2008
58. A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey
59. Night, by Elie Wiesel
60. The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier
61. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
62. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
63. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
64. The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
65. A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle
66. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski
When she opened the 2005 season with her selection of A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey, she had no idea that she would become embroiled in a controversy that would trigger thirteen class-action lawsuits, a bruising clash with a prestigious publisher and a revered editor, plus a tirade from The New York Times that would make the Franzen fracas look like sweet potato pie. As Jonathan Franzen remarked a few years later, “Oprah should keep away from white guys with the initials J.F.”
In the beginning, Oprah was bewitched by James Frey’s harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery. For three months she gave him the full love treatment. “The book … kept me up for two nights straight,” she told her audience