Queen Of All Media

Monday, Oct. 05, 1998 By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Article Tools

(2 of 3)
Winfrey's work has avoided the voyeuristic label partly because her primary subject has always been her own life. She has talked about her relationship with longtime boyfriend Stedman Graham; she has admitted using cocaine when she was in her 20s; she has revealed being raped at age 9. Springer avoids personal questions and won't even tell reporters his marital status. He stands in the audience, amused, as his guests slug it out. Winfrey demands as much honesty from herself as she does from her guests and viewers.

A signature feature of Winfrey's show, her enormously influential on-air book club, has, with each pick, revealed itself to be a literary manifestation of Winfrey's own desires, fears and ghosts. Certain themes and topics are explored again and again, in book after book. Secrets. Child abuse. Physical abnormalities. The first club selection, The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard, was about a lost child. Other selections struck similar chords: Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone centers on an obese victim of sexual molestation; Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue focuses on an abusive marriage; on page 1 of the book-club pick Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, the narrator says, "When I was little, I would think of ways to kill my daddy."

Novelist Edwidge Danticat, whose novel Breath, Eyes, Memory was an Oprah book-club choice (it's the fictional tale of a sexually abused Haitian girl reunited with her mother), says literature offers readers a way of healing psychic wounds. "There are a lot of us who feel some part of us, an important part, was salvaged by reading. Oprah says that when she reads about people who are going through similar experiences to her own, she feels less alone. A lot of us share that feeling."

Almost all the film and TV projects Winfrey has become involved in have been based on books that have made a personal impact on her. Winfrey's production company, Harpo Films, has a deal with ABC to produce six TV movies under the heading "Oprah Winfrey Presents," and all three of the movies so far have been based on such books, notably the highly rated Before Women Had Wings, which centers on a young girl who is physically abused by her alcoholic mother. Among Harpo's upcoming TV projects: a remake of the 1962 movie David and Lisa, which portrays two teens in a mental home, and an adaptation of the novel Rich Deceiver, about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who wins the lottery. Harpo also plans to produce a film or video version of another Toni Morrison novel, Paradise.

"I wouldn't call the movies we make 'uplifting'; that's too limiting a word," says Kate Forte, Harpo's executive vice president. "We look for projects that show individuals being responsible for themselves. It's all about seeing human beings as active creators of their lives rather than as passive victims."