Not a story I’ve paid a lot of attention to, but I thought it was interesting that Oprah is now striking an indignant attitude concerning the mess about “A Million Little Pieces.”

It is difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped … but more importantly I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.

When a blogger broke the story that the supposed memoir of a rehabbed druggie was riddled with untruths, Oprah huffed that it was “much ado about nothing.” Which was stupid. She was putting her rep with all of her devotees up against the prevalent notion that memoirs don’t belong in the fiction aisles of the bookstores. Remember the “autobiography” of Howard Hughes that turned out to be a hoax. If we use Oprah’s line of defense, we’d have shrugged about the deception and read it anyway, because it probably had at least some true facts in it. And the same might go for the supposed Hitler diaries.

For what it’s worth, at the time I was curious to read what someone thought Hitler’s diaries would be like. But unfortunately for Oprah, the present ethos is what it is. If her author Frey “altered details about every single one of the characters to render them unidentifiable,” as he now admits, his book isn’t a memoir, but an invention. And for Oprah to want people to blur the two together just so her golden statue doesn’t get tarnished is disingenuous and dishonorable, to say the least.

I’ve never been much of a fan. I just don’t get the whole Oprah thing. (I’m just trying to imagine how weird I’d have to be to let anyone publish a magazine of my tastes, my interviews, my recipes and my thoughts with my picture on every cover and my first initial as the name. That’s messed up, man.) But she has a lot of fans (and when I say “lot”, I mean it in the same sense that Abraham has a “lot” of descendants), and I think she let them down on this one. O, the shame.