From today’s Page Six item about Oprah Winfrey’s self-scuttled book deal:
“A decade ago, Knopf paid the talk-show queen a bundle for her memoir, to be written with Joan Barthel of A Murder in Canaan fame. Oprah was so concerned the manuscript be kept secret that after each session with Barthel, she had the completed pages put away in her safe. Oprah went to a book fair to hype sales, and there was every indication the book would be a huge best seller, when she suddenly canceled publication… Now the buzz at Zocalo restaurant is that Oprah never explained why she pulled the plug—and never will. And Barthel, who recently moved back to New York after a long stay in St. Louis where her mother lived, has likewise maintained her silence.”
Now, with a little digging, it’s easy to find out Barthel wrote a glowing profile of Oprah for Ms. in 1986, which almost certainly landed her the memoir-shaping gig. And the book was indeed listed in Knopf’s winter 1998 catalog; you can still see its phantom Amazon.com listing. But why are Post readers hearing about this now? And why the left-field mention of Zocalo, an UES “Nuevo Mexican” restaurant with no discernible connection to Oprah, as if anyone there would know about her book deal? (I mean, unless a Knopf insider was having dinner there or something…) If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect the whole purpose of the item is to let people know Joan Barthel’s back in town and knows how to hold up her end of a non-disclosure agreement. That’s a nice gesture, but if you’re going to do something like that, it helps to get the name of the book right: It’s A Death in Canaan.