C-SPAN’s Book TV has uploaded a clip of Nan Talese‘s attack on Oprah Winfrey while defending James Frey and A Million Little Pieces:
“Why didn’t Nan refuse to go on the show,” a reader asks, “or better yet while on the show why did she not divulge that she had been taken advantage of by Oprah’s producers?” I think this clip answers the first question very well—Talese says she held out as long as she could, and only agreed to do the show when she was told the topic would not be confined to Frey, and her publishers urged her to go on—and as for the second, I’d hazard a guess: The pressures of live television may have been a factor, and even if she had the presence of mind during the taping to recognize what was happening to her as a bait-and-switch, perhaps she felt it would be bad manners to say so.