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Australian novelist and literary prankster Peter Carey on James Frey:

It's trite to say it, but the US is a country run by liars going to war on a fantasy, so it's interesting to see people getting self-righteous about James Frey. And by the way, if you're going to publish a memoir by an addict in rehab, everyone knows that one of the corollaries of addiction is lying. So I don't see why everyone gets into such a fucking uproar because an addict is a liar! Oprah acted like a total bully: talk about about crushing a butterfly on a wheel—or a cockroach on a wheel— because that's what she did on television to this little creep.

We always saw Oprah's stage not so much as a wheel as a socio-cultural Gitmo, but whatever. He's got a point about the silliness of the uproar, but you can't expect a foreigner to fully understand the great American cult of Harpo.

Peter Carey: Fakes, Frauds, Lies and Hoaxes [The Bookseller via Galleycat]