Michiko Kakutani on reality, deconstruction, objectivity, Frey, Oprah . . . .

From , the NY Times, Jan. 17, "Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways" :

"Mr. Frey's embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the "writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story," his casual attitude about how people remember the past - all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act . . . . "
"His distortions serve as an illustration of a depressing remark once made by the literary theorist Stanley Fish - that the death of objectivity "relieves me of the obligation to be right"; it "demands only that I be interesting." "

(On a tangential note, does anyone else, reading the first segment, think that perhaps "retailing" is a typo?)

That aside, reading the righteous eloquence of Kakutani, Karr, and all the others noted in previous posts, I am relieved to read so many powerful voices on the issue, re-infuriated at Frey, Random House (owners of Frey's publishers, Doubleday and Anchor), Oprah, and, in the end, I'm nearly dumbfounded: they do the writing so I don't have to. And that's no lie.