I Take It Back – The Oprah’s Book Club Book I Won’t Read

I enjoy fiction. But when it’s fiction passed off as truth? Not so much.

A big thanks to a blog reader who pointed out that A Million Little Pieces is a fake. The author promoted the book as his life story, but it is filled with lies.

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When I did a little research, I realized this was quite a big story in 2006. So big that Oprah kicked it out of her book club and had some choice words to say about the author. You can read about that in this New York Times article.

Author Kicked Out of Oprah’s Book Club

Maybe I should be impressed that this dude wrote a lie as truth and passed it off so darn well that his book made more money in 2005 than any other book in the US except for whatever Harry Potter book came out that year. Or maybe I should be disappointed in the publishing industry. How is it that somewhere along the line one of the many pairs of eyes that looks at a book before it goes into print didn’t catch this colossal lie?

The more I read about it, the more I wondered how I missed this when it was news.

Then it hit me. In those early years of the 2000s, I was reading books like this

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and this.

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Books with many words and few pictures were not a part of my toddler-mommy repertoire. My shelves were void of Oprah’s Book Club books.

Go ahead and read it if you want, but I’m removing it from my Summer Reading List. I’m gonna put my 50-cent garage sale copy in the kindling box. It should make a great fire starter.

By KimHarms

Kim Harms is an author, speaker, and part-time library assistant with two decades of freelance writing experience. She has a degree in English from Iowa State University. She and her husband Corey have three super-awesome sons and one crazy dog. A two-time breast cancer survivor, her first book, Life Reconstructed: Navigating the World of Mastectomies and Breast Reconstruction (Familius), is a guide for women walking the breast cancer road. She is currently working on her second book, a devotional for women going through breast cancer.

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