Nan Talese: Oprah Exhibited 'Fiercely Bad Manners'
The French have a phrase, spirit de l’escalier, or the wit of the staircase. At the bottom of that staircase, after a verbal drubbing, there comes to you the perfect, syntactically elegant retort that might have silenced one’s nemesis moments previous. Unfortunately, it comes to you several minutes too late.
Nan Talese‘s espirit de l’escalier surfaces a year and a half after her cringe-worthy Oprah appearance. Talese, publisher and editorial director of the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint, quietly suffered her spanking — or, as Slate’s Tim Noah called it at the time a “televised interrogation” — at the hands of Oprah Winfrey and her studio audience over James Frey‘s nonfactual-memoir, A Million Little Pieces.
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