Word: oprah
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...goal is that she won't be able to raise her eyebrows," explains Dr. Patricia Wexler, who wears cat glasses, sports a '60s-style bubble haircut and has a teasing, just-between-girlfriends way with patients that makes her office seem more like Oprah than a dermatology clinic. The injections she administers--"Don't worry! It's only a baby needle!"--leave a series of bloody little welts across Maggie's forehead. Though they look like nasty mosquito bites, they will disappear within minutes as the toxin is absorbed into the muscles; within four or five days, Maggie's forehead...
Though the cash windfall was nice, both authors downplay the sudden change in their fortunes. Lamb and his wife, a high school teacher, are giving a lot of their newfound wealth away, while Mitchard was relieved merely to be able to pay some bills. Oprah has copies of their new books, but Lamb and Mitchard say they have no expectations that the star will pick them again. And it hardly matters. According to Pamela Dorman, Mitchard's editor, the author already has such an enthusiastic following that Viking has printed 400,000 copies of the new title. "Of course there...
That is because, as with products bearing the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, readers already know what they'll be getting with an Oprah book. Says Lamb: "They're all about people trying to connect out of their alienation." They are also usually intimate stories, painted on canvases the size of TV screens, with only occasional attempts by the authors to grapple with the grander forces of history or politics...
...Most Wanted, for instance, could be a topic on Oprah's show: the book is about Texas Teenagers Who Fall Desperately in Love with Convicts--and it's about childless mothers and motherless children. Dorman has said she and Mitchard raced the clock to get the book into the hands of beach readers. The haste shows. Predictable and melodramatic, The Most Wanted lacks the depth of The Deep End of the Ocean, which was a moving portrait of a family in the aftermath of a child's kidnapping...
...hope the works' weaknesses are signs merely of writers still finding their way, not a mark of the Curse of Oprah. Given the pressures of publishing, where marketing and the big chains reign supreme, perhaps all that one-hit wonders need is a bit of quiet time...