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43 Chapter 1 “MORE BOOKS!”: PUBLISHING, NON-FICTION, AND THE MEMOIR BOOM But if you’re publishing [a book] as a memoir, I think the publisher has a responsibility because as the consumer, the reader, I am trusting you. I’m trusting you, the publisher, to categorize this book whether as fiction or autobiographical or memoir. I’m trusting you. – Oprah Winfrey, interview with Nan Talese and James Frey, January 26, 2006 The story of the memoir boom is at its heart a story of publishing. Oprah Winfrey’s comment to Nan Talese, James Frey’s editor and publisher, during the height of the controversy about Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces bears this out. On the Oprah Winfrey Show episode called “A Million Little Lies,” Winfrey called Frey to account because she felt that he had “betrayed the trust of millions” when he published an addiction memoir with some false details. Winfrey asked him to explain to her audience why he would lie about events in his life, but she reserved her comments about problems with genre for the representative of industry: Talese. Winfrey blamed Talese and all of publishing for failing to do the work of classification . For Winfrey, the “rules” that govern memoir are clear and absolute. A memoir is an accurate picture of events that really happened. A memoir should be read not just because it is believable, but because it must be believed. A work of fiction, although it might contain higher truths, is not CHAPTER 1 44 read in the same way. Since Winfrey has dedicated much of her career to encouraging emotional and ethical responses to events of various kinds, the idea that a memoir cannot be trusted appears to her in that moment to be a betrayal of what she values. Although she does not say this, the Frey controversy , as it came to be called, also served to call into question Oprah Winfrey ’s position as a trusted mediator between her audience and specific sets of ideas. This is why Winfrey tried to deflect the work of mediation away from herself, as the host of Oprah’s Book Club, to the publishing industry, as the mediator between books and the reading public. The publishers’ job of categorization, she said, can have implications for the way in which a memoir is received by the public because it is the publisher who decides— for others—what is true and what is not. For Winfrey, these implications move the work of generic classification into economic and political spheres. This makes classification appear to be linked to ethical concerns and to consumer rights. And because Winfrey thinks that books (and especially true books) have the power to change lives, the publishing industry’s use of genre has political implications for her as well. “I’m trusting you,” she said to the world of publishing. In that moment on her show, she meant it. In chapter 5, I will discuss how the Frey controversy is linked to other aspects of public life in the United States during the beginning of the Iraq invasion. But for now, Oprah Winfrey’s comments serve to highlight something important about memoir in the twenty-first century: memoir is produced , and not just written. Memoir is a creative product, but it is still a product and—if Winfrey is right—the genre to which it belongs can even be regarded as a brand produced by the publishing and book retailing industries . This is a far cry from general thinking about how literature is made. Since the Romantic period, literature has been widely thought to have been primarily a creative production by the author, who then has his/her book published. The power of the author is understood to be primary, and the work of publishers and others is thought to be secondary or supplementary , especially in the case of classic or avant-garde literature. This kind of belief in the power of the author can have the effect of branding the author’s persona and proper name and connecting the brand to a certain kind of style and content. Through a set of changes that included the rise of individualism and the attachment of individualism to the idea of creativity, the detachment of authorship from the patronage system and the invention and development of copyright for an author’s works, what we might now call the cult of authorship and author celebrity became the most important way to read and...

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