Word: oprah
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...literature can be notoriously tricky to pull off under any circumstances. So imagine how hard it is if the first act was performed before a live studio audience, on one of the most watched talk shows in television history, in an unlikely but tremendously successful merging of media: Oprah's Book Club. Once an author wins that literary lottery, can he or she possibly pick the right combination of numbers again...
Readers can now decide for themselves. Nearly two years ago, to inaugurate her now famous book club, Oprah Winfrey sent viewers swarming to buy Jacquelyn Mitchard's well-reviewed first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean; four months later, a five-year-old book by Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone, was anointed. Now, with nearly 3 million copies of each book in print, both authors are nervously sending their second novels out into the world. Unless Winfrey gives the writers another on-air boost, Mitchard's The Most Wanted (Viking; 407 pages; $24.95) and Lamb's I Know...
Lamb, who teaches writing at the University of Connecticut, was already more than halfway through I Know This Much Is True when She's Come Undone was rediscovered. Even so, his life as a solitary writer was tossed upside down. "When Oprah came tapping at the biosphere door, it was a kick," he says, "but I sort of had to take a hiatus for a couple of months." At the peak of Oprah fever, Lamb was getting about 75 letters a month from readers, and he had to rent a telephone-free office across town in order to finish...
When my book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was published, I was lucky enough to appear on both Donahue and Oprah--and to glimpse the difference between them. Winfrey related my book to her own life: she began by saying she had read the book and "saw myself over and over" in it. She then told one of my examples, adding, "I've done that a thousand times"--and illustrated it by describing herself and Stedman. (Like close friends, viewers know her "steady beau" by first name...
...power to blend public and private; while it links strangers and conveys information over public airwaves, TV is most often viewed in the privacy of our homes. Like a family member, it sits down to meals with us and talks to us in the lonely afternoons. Grasping this paradox, Oprah exhorts viewers to improve their lives and the world. She makes people care because she cares. That is Winfrey's genius, and will be her legacy, as the changes she has wrought in the talk show continue to permeate our culture and shape our lives...