Spoonfed

A New Earth

I was at dinner the other night with other parents. All of us college educated. One of the Moms said she loved Oprah, yadda yadda, and I asked her if she was reading the latest Oprah bookclub selection, A New Earth.

She said no, that she didn't read them anymore because Oprah chose books that were too hard for her.

A bit of an exaggeration, but I thought, this is a good testament to Oprah. She doesn't dumb-down the books for her audience. Love in the Time of Cholera is an extremely challenging novel, even for us English majors.

And A New Earth isn't a novel at all. It could be categorized as a self-help book, but it's not quite that either. It's a tough read. It's a bit philosophy, a bit spirituality, a bit self-help, and I'm only on Chapter 4.

The author, Eckhart Tolle, is going to be teaching a class on the book online, and something like 50,000 people have already signed up.

And just what is the book about?

It's about human consciousness. What it is, how to access it more deeply, how to transcend the ego. Again, I'm just on Chapter 4.

Eckhart Tolle seems to be in the category of the Ken Wilber -- the prolific author and leader of the Integral Institute (who lives right here in Denver) who is shaping the theories of the evolution of human consciousness. (They'd probably both disagree with that characterization.)

| chick lit |

I am on a chick-lit binge. I'm not sure how or why I managed to get on the bandwagon so late, but here I am. I started a while back with the entire (and entirely forgettable) Sophie Kinsella series. Realizing that my favorite, Pam Houston, was the forerunner of the genre, I re-read all of her books. Then I discovered Jennifer Weiner, after I had ordered "In her shoes" for the fourth time from On-Demand. And now I'm reading "The devil wears Prada," because I'd love to see the movie but with a five month old, there are no movies in my immediate future.

I am racing through these books while nursing. It's sort of like my girlfriend, who has been married 15 years and is the mother of 3, who was addicted to Sex & the City back when I lived in San Francisco. She would call and ask me if my single girl life was really like that; I was so busy back then I had never even seen the show. So I rented the entire first season, stayed home from work to watch every show back to back, and called her to say, pretty much, yes.

I'm imagining, while reading about Miranda Priestly, all the dot-com stories that must have been dredged up and immortalized in some novel. The horrid 27 year old CEO's who came back from Sand Hill investment bankers with mounds of cash. The poorly thought out business plans. The fancy cars. Those SFgirl days, where every single dot-com launch party was publicized and crashed. The martinis. The sushi. The stock options that made paper millionaires of us for a couple of months.

Has this book been written and I missed it? Was it so passe by the time it got published that no one wanted to read it?

| snark is the new irreverent |

I just whizzed through the book "Good in Bed" over the last couple of days while feeding Jack. I've been doing so much reading about thieves and jewels and conmen and whatnot for the Doris Payne book that I'd forgotten what it's like to read for pleasure.

She's got such a strong voice, Jennifer Weiner does, and a blog to boot, and she wrote "In Her Shoes," which was one of my favorite movies this year.

After a four month break from writing, and two months of no contact from Doris, I'm feeling a bit rejuvenated and perhaps even ready to pick up the writing again. You have no idea how exhausting it can be, writing about thievery and lying for months on end. Truly, it takes a toll on the spirit. During the ninth month, when I was thick as molasses, I began to wonder what effect it was all having on little unborn baby's spirit. Now I see that really it was him working his magic on me.

| truth with a capital T |

After months of personal musing on the degree of "truth" that goes into nonfiction books, The Smoking Gun has published a very lengthy investigation into the Truth of James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces. And they determine that it is basically made up of a million little lies -- of both the white variation, as well as the more serious kind. And this fires people up. Does the act of writing one's own memoir, by definition, take the Truth and turn it into a dramatized variation of the truth?

I would argue that it does. It's not the story itself that is so compelling (let's face it; he's a privileged kid who parties too much in college, and his parents pay for rehab), but the way he tells it.

Well, James Frey will be on Larry King tomorrow (Wednesday) night, so I suppose all the speculators, critics and fans will get to hear his side of the story then.

| the reliability of the eyewitness |

I am working on a book based on the true story of a woman who spent 40 years as an international jewel thief. In her career, she has probably made millions of dollars stealing diamond rings and other pieces of jewelry from jewelry shops all over the world. She has stolen from Mom and Pop jewelry stores and from Tiffany’s; from Neiman Marcus and from Van Cleef & Arpels. She has stolen from Harry Winston in Beverly Hills; from Cartier in Paris and Monte Carlo; from Bulgari in Rome; and from Garrard’s – the jeweler of Her Royal Majesty --- in London.

Some of the stories she has told me can be verified. She has, after all, more than 30 felony convictions under her belt. However, only a handful of those are applicable to her really big heists, and none of those apply to her international adventures.

I'm in the midst of the research phase right now. It's a bit overwhelming, but more important, I'm coming to the conclusion that most of her stories, the ones that make her life really interesting and exciting, cannot be verified. She, and the long gone sales clerks, are the only witnesses.

It brings up the question: when writing about true crime, or any true story, for that matter, how reliable is that first-person eyewitness? What if some of the stories simply cannot be verified?

I'm reading Ben Mezrich's second MIT/Vegas story, "Busting Vegas." Like his NY Times bestseller, "Bringing down the house," it's the true story of a team of MIT kids who have a method of beating blackjack.

It's obvious that the story has been dramatized for effect. Scenes are created, dialogue is created, details fabricated. It makes the story exciting, dramatic, suspenseful.

Some would argue that it makes the story not true.

Jack Olsen, a former Time magazine bureau chief and Sports Illustrated editor, argues that good old Capote ruined the entire genre of true crime when he wrote the dramatization of "In Cold Blood."

Ben says himself that many of the true facts were disguised, in order to protect the real identities of his subjects:

I had access to most of the characters, some more than others. Much of the story had to be changed to conceal their identities -- even the chronology. If I had done less, it would have been easy to figure out who they were. Whenever someone writes a book based on a true story, they take liberties. Look at The Perfect Storm. That's a true story, but the boat was lost, so the author had to fill in the story.

And so what if some of the stories have been embellished by either the eyewitness or the author?

If it's a good story, does it even matter? Can you get around the accusations of not telling the truth by simply putting a disclaimer, that some details have been changed? Or do you, at some point, just give up and call it fiction? Like the story "Catch me if you can," is the movie version more entertaining than the real story?

This, friends, is my dilemma.

| the power of oprah |

It never ceases to amaze me, the power Oprah has.

When she runs a special on the plight of Africa, Africa becomes the hot topic.

When she runs a show about the top ten child molesters, the ones the FBI can't find, within a week 3 of them are captured.

And when she picks a book for her book club, she makes an author's career.

When Oprah first started her book club, she got an entire population not only reading novels, but discussing them. That alone is impressive. When she started worrying about the effect she was having on the careers of living authors, she tried to dismantle the book club. But her audience demanded it, they needed it! So she turned to the Classics. Last summer, she got people to read William Faulkner. That's enough to convince me she has more influence than the President of the United States.

Oprah has finally broken with her tradition of the Classics, and has named James Frey, author of the memoir "A Million Little Pieces" as her new pick. Immediately, he is number one of the NY Times Bestseller list.

The thing is, when a book gets picked by Oprah, it's immediately held to a higher bar. It's judged not only for its content and writing style, but whether it's good for the general populace. Salon writes a scathing commentary on the book:

The problem isn't that Frey's book is a memoir per se; it's that it's a memoir of addiction, of recovery -- and a bad one at that. The books in her club -- especially during the "classics" years -- were markedly different from much of the rest of Oprah's show, which already covers this terrain. With James Frey, the book club is losing its identity as a literary feature, morphing into yet another vehicle for self-help. His story might be shocking, but it isn't art...

Maybe, after years of coaching from Oprah herself, her acolytes will see Frey's memoir for what it is: the story of a spoiled boy from the suburbs who nearly lost his life, and then cashed in on his mistakes and the misery he caused to so many people around him.

I'm sure he did not write this thinking that America's suburban housewives would all love it, but that's what he got.

* * *

And on a completely different publishing note, Ben Mezrich has released yet another book capitalizing on America's frenzied love affair with all things Vegas. "Busting Vegas" is the story of "The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the CASINOS TO THEIR KNEES."

For those of you who read "Bringing Down the House," this is a completely different story. It's the story of a Russian kid who answers one of those flyers for the MIT blackjack team, he goes to a meeting with a room full of nerds, he gets picked out by the sharksuit wearing leader, he learns the super special super secret math tricks to beat the house, he goes to Vegas, he plays lots of hands, he wears ridiculous clothes, he stays in posh suites, he lives a double life, he has a love interest, he gets in some trouble, he has lots and lots of money.

I know, I know, it sounds an awful lot like the other book, except that guy was an Asian American or something, but really, it is different.