Oprah’s Scruple Club

There are already enough pundits frothing at the mouth today over James Frey, and I can’t say Oprah didn’t make a good faith effort to make amends for defending him so precipitously.  I have no problem believing she was caught up in it all, but I also can’t help but wonder if she would have questioned her defense of Frey had she not received a slew of critical e-mail from her fan base.  In particular I wonder at her castigation of Nan Talese, Frey’s editor, for accepting Frey’s fantastical description of two root canals without Novocaine.  Talese said that she herself had had a root canal without Novocaine and the account seemed plausible enough to her and her staff.  If Oprah bought the “memoir” text hook, line, and sinker, I can agree with her criticism of Doubleday that they should have assiduously checked facts, but question Oprah’s vehemence at that moment.  

I think Oprah’s Achilles heel is not a concern for ratings or publicity, for I actually do believe her actions are from the heart.  Her weakness is the weakness of writers and book consumers alike:  we feel so drawn to the writers of compelling prose that we see moral issues through a literary lens.  Black and white facts become gray nebulae, layers upon layers of nuances.  I wish I had watched the show where Oprah defended the writer Ayelet Waldman, whose essay in the New York Times flat-out states that she loved – well, you read it:  

I am in love with my husband…It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

You’re not a bad mom for having these feelings.  You’re a bad mom for sharing them with the New York Times.  What has this to do with children feeling good about themselves? 

An example: I often engage in the parental pastime known as God Forbid. What if, God forbid, someone were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of them. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child’s death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband.
 
…My husband will say that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes, that the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.… I should not use that wretched phrase ”bad mother.”  At the very least, I should allow that, if nothing else, I am good enough. I do know this: When I look around the room at the other mothers in the group, I know that I would not change places with any of them.I wish some learned sociologist would publish a definitive study of marriages where the parents are desperately, ardently in love, where the parents love each other even more than they love the children. It would be wonderful if it could be established, once and for all, that the children of these marriages are more successful, happier, live longer and have healthier lives than children whose mothers focus their desires and passions on them.

Um, welcome to La-La Land, Ayelet.  I did learn in college sociology that parental attachment to children was rare before the Industrial Revolution. But let’s not cross wires on separate issues.  You can love and nurture your children without being Mommy the Doormat.  I question why we have to declare a competition between love for a spouse and love for one’s children.  We’re also touching on the issue of shopping around for scientific studies that affirm what we want to believe.) 

BUT even … in the event that I face a day of reckoning in which my children, God forbid, become heroin addicts or, God forbid, are unable to form decent attachments and wander from one miserable and unsatisfying relationship to another, or, God forbid, other things too awful even to imagine befall them, I cannot regret that when I look at my husband I still feel the same quickening of desire that I felt 12 years ago when I saw him for the first time, standing in the lobby of my apartment building, a bouquet of purple irises in his hands.

(Maybe you’d feel differently if you got someone to help you pry that swollen head of yours out of your ass.) 

And if my children resent having been moons rather than the sun? If they berate me for not having loved them enough? If they call me a bad mother? I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.

What these kids deserve are a mother who will put their privacy and self-esteem ahead of her own need to indulge her urge of public self-expression in the Times.  Luckily, Oprah “understood” her enough to focus a show on the issue. 
 
Of course, we don’t live in a world of solid, alternating black-and-white Harlequin diamonds.  Life is mottled gray; it is nebulous.  And talented writers of the world capture this misty watercolor morality.  I’m just wondering when and where it goes too far. 

While I don’t advocate moral absolutism, neither do I condone intellectualizing away ethical red flags.  One of the most compelling memoirs I have read was a Ladies’ Home Journal story (I think)by Inette Miller, which went on to become the novel Burning Bridges.  I can understand the gravity of the author’s unhappiness.  I can see that the marriage might have ended anyway had she not initiated an affair with a married friend.  But no matter how drawn in I am to the text, she loses me when she recounts how she tells her five-year-old why Mommy and Daddy are getting divorced, or turns down sex with her estranged husband because she “shifted (her) fidelity” to the other man. 

We writers, we want to be cool.  We want to connect; we want to be judgmental and open-minded.  We don’t want to alienate the kindred spirits we’re attracted to…or each other.  It’s us against the world.  It’s us, all lit lovers, and Oprah and Harpo, Incorporated, against the world.