Re: Do you regret your run-in with Oprah?

Description: Given the chance to do it over, would Franzen have wanted The Corrections to be part of Oprah's book club?

Transcript:

Do I regret any part of that experience, all these years later, you know, it’s hard for-- yeah sure as a writer you regret how long it takes to you fully figure out what the real situation was and I wanna rewrite it in my head and know the whole thing, rather than only part of it.  So I think it’s hard to find fault though, I mean regret really means, what does regret mean, it’s not like I wasn’t trying to very hard to do my best.  Some of these things just have to play out the way they play out.

 

Yeah, I never really had any problem with that, it was probably not a great fit, you know, the world kind of divides it into people that one opinion of Oprah Winfrey and people who have kind of the diametrically opposite opinion.  That’s a remarkable thing to achieve, to divide the world in two, you’re sort of parting the seas.  I think I feel some confidence, she’d be comfortable with the magnitude of that image.

 

 

Recorded On: 4/1/08