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Nonfiction Authors Feeling the Frey Fallout
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Carol Memmet at USA Today investigates the effect that the James Frey disaster is having on nonfiction writers. Memoirists are having to answer lots of questions from their publishers about the facts in their biographies: one author hired a private detective to get all the names and dates straight.

Janice Erlbaum, whose memoir of her life as a homeless teen, Girlbomb, has just been published by Villard, says she had "an extensive legal review with the Random House legal department, but I don't think they followed up." "They asked me a lot of questions like, 'What were the dates that this happened?' They really wanted to know who was who. I don't think they did any independent verification, but they certainly did ask me about every person and every detail in the book."

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Cupcake Brown, whose A Piece of Cake, a memoir of substance abuse and gangbanging, is also new to stores, hired a private investigator to help get facts right. "I wanted to be as honest and truthful as possible and have as much factual background and backup and evidence as possible ? way before Frey. Every memoirist should do that."

Jenny Frost, president of Crown, Brown's publisher, says Crown didn't fact-check Brown but says of life after Frey: "I would like to think that we've always been intelligent about our authors and good judges of character. Certainly, in Cupcake's case, that's how we feel." But, she adds, "we'll never be quite as innocent as we were before."

Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close friend said Sunday. She was 58. Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday, Howle said.

She received many awards, and in 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a "genius" award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years. Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married. "Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing," Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. "For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the '60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community."

[I]f you're in the late-night comedy business, you have to go after Cheney this week, however much you're craving to do bits on North Korea or the secretary of Agriculture ? and if you're writing the opening extravaganza and monologue for the Oscar broadcast, you've got to come up with "Brokeback Mountain" stuff and George Clooney stuff, no matter how many others are doing it. The trick is simply to do it smarter and funnier, and that's the challenge for Stewart and his partners in both endeavors, Ben Karlin, executive producer of "The Daily Show," and David Javerbaum, its chief writer.

"I'm not doing this for posterity," he says of hosting Oscar night. Stewart leans back behind his desk and explains how these awards are a 78-year-old entity and a pretty sweet franchise and he'll be borrowing interest from it, not the other way around. Can he bring a slightly different atmosphere? "That may be," he says.

"My impulse is always to start with absurdity, either the absurdity of me doing it, or whatever the absurdity may be of this year's films ... I'll do that or I will come up with a song parody that somehow figures out a way to rhyme 'Syriana' and 'Capote,' which is not going to be easy," though that quip comes out a little stale, the line perhaps past its expiration date, just as Cheney bits may be by Oscar night.

"But I'm hoping that the vice president shoots someone [else], probably around March 3, March 4," Stewart says.

A survey by the market research business Outsell Inc., which echoes other recent studies, determined that 61 percent of consumers look to their newspapers as an essential source for local news, events and sports, followed by television (58 percent) and radio (35 percent). About 6 percent turn to the major Internet search engines for local news and information.

The survey of 2,800 consumers' news habits found that television is consumers' top choice for national news. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they rely on network, cable and satellite TV as primary or secondary sources of national news. Thirty-three percent choose their local newspapers first or second for coverage of national events, followed by 28 percent who access sites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL News. Eleven percent of consumers are relying regularly on their daily newspapers' Web sites, the survey said.