“I believe that the truth matters,” Oprah Winfrey assured her viewers last year following her on-air confrontation with author James Frey. By then the Smoking Gun had revealed that Frey’s best-selling “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, which Oprah’s book club had promoted, was partially concocted, and Oprah was pissed. “I feel that you conned us all,” she admonished him during a stern and thorough grilling. Her indignation had been slow to develop, but once it had (following public outcry) it wasn’t reserved for Frey alone. Nan Talese, who had published A Million Little Pieces under her Doubleday imprint, also came in for a share. “As the consumer, the reader, I am trusting you,” Oprah lectured. Eventually, the publisher would settle a class action lawsuit by offering refunds to the book’s “defrauded” purchasers.
So what? you may be asking. The question came up a lot in discussions of Frey’s dishonesty, and back then the only answer with any weight was that we value truth for truth’s sake. Many readers were inspired by what they believed to be a true story, but it’s hard to show that Frey’s lies did any real damage. But The Secret has potential to cause tangible harm to both believers and bystanders.
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This stuff probably sounds more silly than dangerous, but consider her health claims: “You cannot ‘catch’ anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it with your thought,” she writes. Of course in reality the reverse is often true, as the case of Magic Johnson, diagnosed with HIV in 1991, illustrates. “I thought I was invincible,” he explained in a 2004 interview with CNN.
Byrne quotes many of them to bolster her claim that our thoughts control our experiences, and the author’s intended meaning does not concern her. “You create your own universe as you go along,” a line from Winston Churchill’s My Early Life, exemplifies this. True, it sounds very Oprah, but it is something Churchill wrote not as a description of his own beliefs but as one example of the “absurd propositions” of metaphysicians. He believed exactly the opposite of what Byrne would have you think. Says Churchill, three lines later, “These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. I warn my younger readers only to treat them as a game.”
