Trial by Oprah - Part II - The Apology

In explaining why she wanted James Frey back on the show for a follow-up interview, Oprah Winfrey cited a revelation that had come to her after meditation which one day progressed to her bursting into tears in the shower. Her people at Harpo had pointed out her ire in the earlier interview with the author - and she professed utter surprise. It was all incomprehensible to her. She had been harsh, she finally admitted; she had at her own ego's insistence taken the superior role in making a writer own up to his mistake, but excused her attitude because she had "put herself out there" in recommending his book A Million Little Pieces for the Oprah Book Club, and then when it wasn't what she'd told everyone it was, someone had to pay.

"How DARE you!" had been her earlier position, and in hindsight she realized that outrage was the result of her own ego. "I'm so embarrassed," she remembers saying more than once in that interview. The questions she'd asked, she agreed, were necessary, but her harshness in the way she'd asked the questions, was not. She'd lost her usual compassion. With few exceptions, her shows had been about showing compassion for people as they told their stories. She hadn't given him that empathy.

Yesterday, in part-one of this interview, Oprah expressed surprise that the author had felt ambushed in the previous interview. A picture was shown of a large painting he owned with the words Public Stoning in large letters against a pastel sky background. Surely that doesn't represent anything having to do with our earlier interview, she insists, and he explains that he thinks of that painting more as a warning to himself than a remembrance of a day he considers more like a personal car crash. It's not something he really remembers, or wants to.

They apologize to each other, and with Oprah appearing misty-eyed, it's time for a break, but not before we see James Frey rise from his chair and reach out to give her a hug.

The show gets better after that. We get to see where he works, and see him signing his newest book, The Last Testament of the Bible. Oprah almost stirs things up again when she comments that he must have written the book to cause trouble, that he must possibly be arrogant. He'd explained that he wanted to write defiantly, in ways that nobody had before, as against convention, but that he knew he had something not only important to say, but that would change people's lives. All great art has that goal, to shake things up, he says.

After a short discussion of his infant's son's death, Oprah bumbles with this observation: "So you got over that, and then . . . "

James Frey, in the fastest reply he's made in two days, interrupts. "I didn't get over it; I'll never get over it."

He came back from France but didn't want to. He loved France. He realized he had to face all the things he'd run from with the book and its aftermath. He wrote. That was his job and he loved it. He loved his wife and family. He loved his life.

Back on her high road as super interviewer, Oprah asks, as she's asked all her guests, "What did you learn from all that?"

It was a gift, he says, and his life is better, happier.