Living Oprah

‘m afraid I’m turning into somewhat of a Debbie Downer around here these days, but I can’t help but share my honest opinion of Chicago author Robyn Okrant’s Living Oprah: I don’t really like it. Normally, on this site, you’ll notice that my dislike tends to be a bit more emphatic, but honestly, moderate dislike fits the tone of this book perfectly.

Let’s start with the good, since I’m tired of being such a drag all the time. Living Oprah is a book that details Okrant’s one-year experiment to follow every bit of advice given by Oprah through Oprah’s talk show, magazine, and radio show. I’ll admit that I find the topic pretty interesting. Like many of us, I grew up in a household that was graced by Oprah’s voice every weekday from 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm, and I remember the endless advice that she dispensed for the modern-day woman. How hard would it be to buy all of her recommended clothing, to follow all of her relationship rules, to follow her weight-loss advice for one year?

Okrant makes a somewhat valiant attempt at answering these questions. She watches Oprah each and every day for a year, which totals 262 hours of television watching (which isn’t something I’d ever want to commit myself to) and she comes up with some interesting insights. Despite Okrant’s obvious love of Oprah, she does take issue with some of Oprah’s advice. When Oprah proudly lists the ten items every woman must own in her closet, Okrant asks, “Who makes up these rules? Who gets to decide what is beautiful?” She laments, “much of the direction I’m taking from the show this year is making me feel like less of an individual.” She even comes right out and says, “I think Oprah devalues women by focusing so much on our bodies.”

I like that this book pushes the envelope of Oprah worship into Oprah critique, but I don’t think it goes far enough with it. My feelings about Oprah aside, I just don’t think this book takes very many risks. When Okrant goes out on a limb and says that Oprah devalues womens’ bodies, she hedges this comment with all sorts of disclaimers in her writing and diction. Before making this comment, she devalues her writing as, “a little of stream of consciousness,” and while making her critique she imagines her, “editor’s red pencil hovering ominously over this page.” She even finishes her critique with a brief letter to Oprah which she asks her readers to disregard.

I think she was making a very keen observation by saying that Oprah might devalue women by focusing so much on their bodies. After reading her book, I felt a little surprised at how much advice Oprah seems to offer about clothing and waistlines. Yet the critique wasn’t well thought out or well written. Nothing risky or interesting was really said. Okrant didn’t go anywhere with her idea. And this is where the whole book seems to fail. Throughout the book Okrant begins to make important points, then backs off of them or runs away from them by saying things like, “I’m still very conflicted about this.”

Which brings up another frustration I have with the book. It doesn’t have enough Oprah in it. Often, when reading non-fiction these days, I feel as though I’m reading blog entries. Reading this book made me wonder, what am I getting out of reading this that I couldn’t have gotten out of reading her Living Oprah blog? This book feels like it was scantily researched and quickly thrown together. It contains relatively few quotes from Oprah, facts about Oprah’s show and her fan-base, or really researched information at all. I think this experiment would have been much more interesting to read if Okrant had put some more fervor into her research. I don’t want to read twenty different sentences throughout the course of a book that all basically state that Okrant sat down to watch Oprah in the morning as her husband ran out the door for work. I want to read sentences about what Oprah actually said on her show and how that impacted Okrant.

And finally, I must make a comment about the editing of this book. I’m not sure where the blame falls here–on Okrant, her editor, or maybe both of them–but this book is filled with grammatical errors of all kinds. I could point out examples of omitted hyphens, missing commas, comma splices, and serious tense issues. Can anyone tell me what “rich in nutrition” actually means? There are sentences like: “Also, I always felt as if Oprah took sort of ownership of a book when her name was the front cover…” Does she mean, “a kind of ownership?” or “Oprah sort of took ownership?” I could go on, but you get the idea. What are we paying editors for these days? Sheesh.

Clearly, I didn’t love this book. If you’re interested in Okrant’s experience, I think reading her blog would be much more fruitful for you, and less expensive than buying this book.  Then again, the book does have some nice insights. Perhaps the most interesting one came while she was watching Oprah during her Thanksgiving vacation with her family:

“It dawns on me that much of my year has been the same: watching TV, following advice, trying to find my elusive ‘best life.’ All the while, my ‘real life’ slides past in a blur.”