FishbowlLA: Bright, Shiny Softballs

Tina Dupuy of mediabistro.com’s FishbowlLA is unimpressed by the local paper’s James Frey interview, claiming Scott Timberg‘s front-page interview “acts as if [A Million Little Pieces] was The Blair Witch Project and more of a hoax than a fabrication.”

Judge for yourself. If there’s one thing I had to take issue with in the article, it would be the suggestion that “Frey’s new book is getting serious attention… likely from a sense many have that Frey was wronged by [Oprah Winfrey] and the publishing industry, that he became a scapegoat for the long history of ‘imaginative’ and pumped-up memoirs.” I would respectfully counter-argue that your major media outlets are devoting space to Frey not because reviewers and editors are saying to themselves what a shame it was that Oprah screwed him over (even though she did) and how nice it would be to do the guy a solid, but because doing a story on an author who’s already familiar to their audiences is a lazy strategy for keeping those audiences from getting bored and moving on to some other media outlet.

(Hmm. I seem to have four fingers pointing back at me; now how did that happen?)

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