Oprah Plays It Safe- Sort Of
After the problems that have come up with James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, Oprah has gone back to a classic for her next book choice. It is Night by Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Elie Wiesel. It is a remarkable book, stark, powerful, a child's view of the Holocaust. It is a book on many, many, many required reading lists. It should be. So Oprah is playing it safe.

Well, maybe not. Catch this from the Associated Press on Tuesday:

there has long been confusion over how to label it. While Wiesel and his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, call it a memoir, "Night" is frequently listed as fiction on course syllabuses and was called a novel in a 1983 New York Times review of a Wiesel biography. "Night" is described in an Amazon.com editorial review as "technically a novel," albeit so close to Wiesel's life that "it's generally — and not inaccurately — read as an autobiography."
--AP News from Yahoo!

Memoirs, especially memoirs that are based in personal or group trauma, are, by nature going to be more than memoir and may even look like fiction. Here, too, from Yahooo!

Karen Hall, who has taught a course on the "literature of trauma" at Syracuse University, calls "Night" a "trauma narrative" and says such books are unavoidably subjective. She regards the book as a novel and plans to keep doing so.

"For me, then, `Night' is 100 percent true in its call to readers to remember the Holocaust, listen to and learn from its survivors, and never to allow such an event to take place again," says Hall, now an assistant professor at Ithaca College.

In no way do I mean to compare Night to A Million Little Pieces, but the whole idea of "trauma narrative" makes a lot of sense in both. The personal trauma of James Frey's life is clear, even if it is somewhat self-started. A good writer, like Frey, who wants to convey that trauma will need to tell the story in a way that embellishes fact to portray truth. Potentially, Frey's book could become the paradigm of addiction narratives. It's worth it.

But Oprah has not played it safe. Not by choosing such an incredibly powerful and wrenching book like Night. Just consider this passage as quoted at Forbes.com:

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. ... Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

Safe? Let's hope not! It a subject far too important to play it safe.