Oprah Makes Frey Confess

I just want to follow up on the James Frey story now that Oprah has made him confess on national television. Here are some excerpts from the latest story on this:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Author James Frey confessed to Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he made up details about every character in his memoir "A Million Little Pieces" and the talk show host apologized to her viewers, saying she felt "duped."

At one point early in the interview Frey said he still viewed the work as a memoir, not a novel. By the show's end Winfrey made him admit he lied.

"This hasn't been a great day for me," he said. "I feel like I came here and I have been honest with you. I have, you know, essentially admitted to ..."

"Lying," Winfrey interrupted.

"To lying," he said. "It's not an easy thing to do in front of an audience full of people and a lot of others watching on TV. ... If I come out of this experience with anything it's being a better person and learning from my mistakes and making sure I don't repeat them."

Sitting with Frey in side-by-side easy chairs, Winfrey quizzed the author point-by-point about his book that described his drug-and-alcohol addiction and the people hurt by it.

"All the way through the book I altered details about every one of the characters," Frey said, to disguise true identities.

He spent two hours in jail, not 87 days, and the account of his breaking up with a woman who later committed suicide happened in a much shorter period of time, with their separation occurring while he was taking care of personal business in North Carolina, not while he was in jail, he said.

Asked if The Smoking Gun Web site, which first questioned the book, had accurately characterized the discrepancies, Frey said "I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate," adding they did "a good job."

Frey said he had developed an image of himself for the book as "being tougher than I was, badder than I was" as a "coping mechanism."

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