I'd never seen Oprah in action for more than a few minutes, but I could see why she is so revered and influential as she jumped back into the Frey fray today. She reeked of both sincerity and anguish, and her reasons for wanting to believing James Frey in the first place, defending him on Larry King a few weeks ago, and now admitting that she was wrong, were very human.

James Frey reminded me of me when I was an 11-year-old boy who had just been turned over to the parish priest for stealing candy at the supermarket. What can you say, really, except that you didn't mean to do it. That is to say that the essential truth was that I was not a bad person at heart even though I was, undoubtedly, a thief. The worst part about the affair was that I had given the supermarket manager a false name — somebody I barely knew. That made me a liar and coward for not owning up to my mistake. The priest took me over his knee and gave me a spanking, kind of like what Oprah did to Frey.

I survived, and eventually realized that what I did was wrong even if it wasn't the crime of the century.

I hope Frey does. I hope he doesn't slide into drug use, or worse. I truly hope he's able to take this experience and move forward in his recovery. If I were him, I'd sell my loft and house in the Hamptons, pull out of the movie deal, move to a down-home town in the middle of nowhere, and take a job that would help me see beyond myself.

Nan Talese, the Doubleday publisher who nominally took responsibility for the book, didn't really. She made excuses. I found her to be the more irksome character on the show today.

Bertelsmann Media Worldwide, the corporate parent of Doubleday, should take the millions of dollars of profits it has banked — and will — from A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard and establish a trust fund for addicts who can't afford to pay for rehab.

The person who made the most sense about the importance of truth was Roy Peter Clark, who spoke for a few minutes toward the end of Oprah's show. I admired a series called Fifty Writing Tools that Clark wrote on Poyteronline a couple of years ago. Anyone who is interested in techniques for writing nonfiction "creatively" should read it. In reviewing Clark's work tonight, I could not find any discussion about the importance of not making things up. Of course not. In the old school tradition that Clark represents, it's so obvious a requirement that it need not be addressed.

And now I think I'll return to reality and put Frey behind me.