Oprah Winfrey: The Greatest Story Ever Told

You have to feel bad for Oprah Winfrey. It can’t be any fun having someone publish a tell-all book claiming that you have abused drugs, exaggerated stories about being raised poor, and perhaps made up the one about being sexually abused as a child.

But you can’t feel too bad for her. After all, Kitty Kelly is only pushing an agenda that Oprah herself has done more than just about anyone on planet earth to advance: namely, the idea, which originated with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the great evil of society is that it forces us to hide behind masks, and that the most authentic thing you can do is lead a life of transparency and complete disclosure.

For Rousseau, the authentic person is one who is in touch with their deepest feelings, whose emotional life is laid bare. Who am I? Rousseau knew the answer to that: Je sens mon coeur, he writes, “I feel my heart.” The key, though, is not to simply be in touch with your deepest feelings, you need to share those feelings with others.

Rousseau’s most successful contemporary heir is Oprah Winfrey. Her entire brand is built around a cult of authenticity through therapeutic self-disclosure and promiscuous emotionality. The crucial literary instrument here is the memoir – the more horrifying, sordid, and cringe-worthy the better.

And so think back to the whole kerfuffle over James Frey. In late 2007, the website The Smoking Gun reported that most of his mega-selling memoir  A Million Little Pieces was a mix of hyperbole, exaggeration, and invention. He hadn’t been arrested fourteen times, he had not spent three months in jail, and he had not got on a plane without ID, missing four teeth, and covered in spit, snot, vomit, and blood.

After the initial revelations about the book’s frauds were first posted on the website, Frey appeared on Larry King Live. At the end of the show, Oprah herself made a surprise call to defend Frey. She claimed that what attracted her to the book was not whether every episode and anecdote was true: it was the book’s “underlying message of redemption” that mattered. She soon changed her tune though, and eventually called Frey onto her show to explain himself. “I feel duped,” she told Frey. “But more importantly, I feel you betrayed millions of readers.”

Oprah might have done better to have stuck with her earlier, Larry King Live defense of Frey. That is because the excuse she gave for him there was entirely in keeping with her whole approach to literature as therapy: Factual truth is irrelevant, what matters is that the story serve as an accurate reflection of the teller’s ongoing self-narrative, their constant search for his or her true self. “Facts” only matter to the extent they serve this higher goal. In Oprah’s world, authenticity is nothing more than a contemporary version of Rousseau’s original idea that the true self is not so much discovered as it is invented.

It isn’t clear that Oprah grasps the irony of the situation she is in. On the one hand, she has spent years encouraging people to spill, for all America to see, the most painful experiences of their lives. That’s evident in her consistent selection of books that are fiction only in the most nominal sense, and whose real function is self-help – books like Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

But more interestingly, it helps explain why Oprah keeps getting duped by fake memoirists. Aside from James Frey, there’s Herman Rosenblat (who wrote a fake memoir about the holocaust), Margaret Seltzer, who made up a story about growing up in an L.A. ghetto, and Misha Defonseca, who penned an incredible memoir about a girl who fled from the Nazis and was raised by wolves. All three were celebrated by Oprah Winfrey on her show or in her magazine; all three were eventually exposed as fakers.

And so along comes Kitty Kelly, unearthing some unpleasant facts about Oprah’s life while suggesting that some elements of the official record are not entirely accurate. Oprah isn’t happy, but why does she even care? She should simply give the same answer in her own defense that she originally gave on Larry King for James Frey: who cares what actually happened, as long as “the underlying message of redemption rings true.”

That’s just another way of saying that all that really matters is that you tell a good story. And Lord knows, America loves a good story. Oprah should know – hers is one of the best, and most lucrative, ever told.

Adapted from The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, published this month by HarperCollins. Andrew Potter is a columnist for Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s national newsweekly. He can be reached at Andrew.Potter@rci.rogers.com

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.