We spent the last couple of nights, my assistant and our little sons and I, in Las Vegas, staying at the nearly psychotically gorgeous Venetian Hotel.

All of Las Vegas is a little like the Venetian now. I'm not the first to call it an adult's Disneyland, complete with furry animal shows and magicians -- but also every manner of vice known to humanity.

The Venetian has, for example, canals that ferry guests through its shopping district, while gondoliers sing 'O Solo Mio' under a sky that turns believably and weirdly sunny and dark by turns.

It is an indoor souk where people can stop at an oxygen bar or drop 20 large on a pair of earrings; and it is difficult to reconcile it with real reality, with a real sky and real birds.

Children wander around with their parents at 11 p.m. on what we in the Midwest would call a school night. Everyone is buying everything there is.

Who are all these people? They're laden -- laden like prospectors' mules with packs -- with bags bearing the labels of Neiman-Marcus, Tiffany, Armani, Burberry, bags that must contain thousands of dollars of clothing and jewelry and leather goods. Who has all that money? An investment banker from California told me she had clients who routinely had $500,000 wired to "the cage" at a casino where they'd be gambling.

At 7 a.m., when we went downstairs before my speaking engagement to buy milk for my assistant Pam's toddler, the same people were at the blackjack tables as had been the night before.

We saw more people smoking indoors than we remember seeing anywhere in America.

At the Venetian, one of the restaurants was called the Tao, and it featured "spiritual dining" and "religious nightlife." Unable to imagine what that was, we inquired of an administrator, who said that it would be pretty hard to have a religious nightclub, and that it was just an advertising gimmick capitalizing on the popularity of Buddhism and other contemplative religions among such opinion makers as Nicole Richie and Demi Moore.

And just as we departed the hotel -- to which I would return, willingly, for this nearly psychedelic sense of suspended normalcy - two conventions were arriving, which, for me, neatly symbolized Las Vegas, a vista in the middle of nowhere jointly founded by a gangster and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

One was the Adult Entertainment Convention, known commonly as the "porn expo." Security people told us that events in corridors and elevators commonly accompanied this conclave of porn and wanna-be porn performers. We saw breasts the size of canteloupes, breasts that Michael Jordan couldn't have .. well.. We saw a woman with her beau, who was wearing a fur G-string and a fur bikini top, who had piercings of .. well every part that could be pierced, and a hotel staff member was explaining to her that she would need to put on a robe even to walk down the hall.

The other convention was the gathering of the Uber Geeks, the Consumer Electronics Show. It drew 140,000 people who wanted to synch their Windows capability wit their Palm prc file or get their home theater controls to also turn on their air conditioners and make their morning coffee.

I'd have paid to spend just one more night to watch the wildlife play.

Or at least, I thought she would.

I thought that Oprah Winfrey would regret choosing Jim Frey's autobiographical memoir, "A Million Little Pieces" as the first "new" book to be selected for her book club after a long foray into exploring the classics.

That choice was greeted with great excitement by living, working writers -- and I was one -- and so, intially, was the book.

It's the story of Frey's rehabiliation, fifteen years ago, from alcoholism and drug addiction. It's an extraordinarily powerful piece of writing; but much of it isn't true. Frey says that embellishing or making up incidents entirely doesn't damage the emotional integrity of the book.

And I guess most people agree. In a dramatic piece of celeb TV, on the night after the revelations about Frey's exaggerations (which were carefully documented on the investigative website The Smoking Gun), Oprah Winfrey phoned in to a live interview between Frey and Larry King.

She said she still endorsed and believed in the book, and wondered why its publishers hadn't spotted the errors of fact. I wonder that, too, actually. I'm not allowed by my editors to step very far off the path even in fiction. I'm told to keep it real. How were Frey's editors so negligent in what was supposed to be an account of fact?

However, Oprah said the small mistakes or exaggerations didn't diminish the worth of the book. And that seems to be the end of it.

The show ran overtime because she'd called. Frey was delighted. His mother was delighted. Larry King, who'd been pitching questions low and tight at Frey until Oprah's call, challenging Frey's veracity, backed off like a pussycat when the call came. He ended up saying that the controversy might actually increase sales.

I was shocked.

Didn't Jim Frey realize that PEOPLE WOULD FIND OUT that a couple of dozen incidents in the book, including Frey's supposedly being "wanted in three states" for felonies, were just hokum? Particularly if he wrote them down?

I thought she would regret presenting this book as truth after Frey basically having fudged some things, including his bearing the pain of having three root canals at once without anesthetic and having a cigarette afterward, and his role in the deaths of two teenage girls (which he aggrandized, making himself seem almost another victim).

I thought she'd be especially appalled by Frey's account of himself as a tough guy who had to be subdued by multiple police officers during an arrest in Ohio. The arrest happened, but Frey, according to police records, was docile and was bailed out after a couple of hours.

I thought she'd be angry when she learned that Frey was never charged with crimes that could have resulted in his facing eight years in prison, that he never served even the three months in jail that his supposed buddies in rehab -- a Mob boss and a federal judge -- finagled for him because he was such a standup guy.

But she wasn't angry.

It's funny how even people so respected as she -- and I do respect her, not just for her role in helping along my career by once choosing my novel as a book club selection, but by doing so much good for so many -- can seem so casual about the truth.

Frey insisted that the "emotional truth" of his book was valid. Even his publisher stood by him, intending to publish his next book (about his time in jail and a friend he met there, although apparently he didn't spend more than a few hours in jail, certainly not enough to do all the reading of great books he claimed to have done there) and a couple of future books.

Frey's book would have had undeniable power as a novel, and it seems that he first intended to publish it that way. But perhaps it wouldn't have gotten the attention that it got, as a novel, because some of the things that seemed unbelievable in it (such as his earning a degree from a good college while supposedly drunk and stoned almost all of every day) wouldn't have had so much punch as they did with the sufferer right there to bear witness. Except he wasn't really bearing witness, except to many falsehoods.

Frey did successfully go through rehab, although he, famously did it HIS way, instead of using the Twelve-Step Program (or so we are led to believe), indicating he had greater strength of character than those who had to rely on a system to get well. And much of what he wrote about the experience of being in a rehabilitation facility may indeed be true. But much of it is neutered by what he said got him there.

What Frey did isn't the same as robbing a bank.

What he did was a smudgy little crime that made him very rich, and which is an embarrassment to people who think that stories that deal with truth, but not fact, are called NOVELS.

Frey said that memoirs were a "new genre" and that journalistic rules didn't really apply.

They aren't a new genre. More than twenty years ago, the great playwright Lillian Hellman was excoriated for her own memoir, "Pentimento," which others who lived through the period she described said was phony. Mary McCarthy, among others, said Hellman seemed to make herself the central figure of most events of the 20th century. People have been called on the carpet for such embroidering for ages, no matter how entertaining and poignant the resulting product is.

The truth is not always more dramatic, but it is always the truth.

I would ask Jim Frey to account for himself to writers such as Jeanette Walls, who wrote "Glass Castle" about her truly horrific childhood with parents who deliberately kept their children homeless and rootless, and who told it straight and compassionately, despite how much it must have hurt. I would ask him to compare himelf to Joan Didion, who confessed in her beautiful, anguishing memoir of widowhood, "The Year of Magical Thinking," that sometimes she couldn't properly remember on which day what had happened, that her thinking was so fuddled by grief she sometimes doubted her own word.

That's what an honest writer, and a honest human being does. Neither Walls nor Didion set out to write a memoir in which she made herself into a hero. She set out to tell a story that involved her life which she felt might hold some value for others.

It's possible to write a memoir, even of a horrible time, and still tell the truth. Arthur Miller did. Elie Weisel did.

Fifty years ago, a little girl called Anne Frank did, in her diary.

Jim Frey didn't; and though criticizing Jim Frey may well cost me my own chance of ever again being an Oprah author, no matter how affecting a book I may write, well, it's the truth.

Jackie Mitchard

All up and down the Pacific Coast, because of a recent lecture trip I took, there are the equivalent of wanted posters in hotels. They show two pleasant-faced women and two lovely little boys. The staff at each hotel must be trained to seek an intervention if they should see these individuals attempting to check in.

I don't think that children and hotels aren't made for each other. I don't think children and planes aren't made for each other.

I think that the PEOPLE who stay in hotels and fly on planes aren't made for each other. Either they don't have children, have children who are mute, or have forgotten how it was when they had young children.

Because they truly hate us. Truly hate us.

They hate us when we struggle down the aisles of planes with diaper bags.They hate us when we call room service for extra water to make baby bottles. They hate us when they have to change the sheets because someone urps. They hate us when we ask for one pancake instead of a short stack with a side of honey-maple ham and potatoes.

Now, sometimes they have reason to hate us. Sometime a kid has a grand-mal yell on a plane or in a hotel. It's annoying. But it's nowhere near so annoying to the person hearing the yell as it is to the parent of the child doing the yelling. We want to die. We want to grab out child and throw ourselves out at 30,000 feet.

The thing is, it seems that people believe we WANT our children to behave badly. That they're not as tired and bored and cramped as the people in the next seat and, unlike adults, they can't zone out and watch the movie or read about Branjolina in People magazine. They simply feel misery.

On one plane, we heard a woman ask her friend, in a voice clearly intended for us to hear, "What's the difference between a terrorist on a plane and a baby?" The friend waited for the answer.

"You can shoot the terrorist," she said.

We're a country who loves to sell things to children, make movies their parents will pay to take them to see and pretend to adore them. But unlike Italy or some other countries I've visited with my kids, we don't really want to be around them. We like the idea that we want no child left behind, when in fact, we want all children left behind, especially when we travel. We want them to be dipped in a plastic coating so that they remain clean and silent until they're big enough to make the kind of clever remarks the ladies made on the plane.

For to most people, children are like exercise. They're a great idea in concept.

Jackie Mitchard

And in the end, she is the Oprah Winfrey we knew her to be.

It takes a big woman to admit that she was took, that she was wrong, that, in the words of the poet, her emotions overwhelmed her intellect. And I don't mean big in the sense of size. I mean in the sense of moral might. Oprah Winfrey started her book club in service of the word. But she lost the high ground when she toasted Jim Frey, author of "A Million Little Pieces," a half-fact me-moir, clearly written more to aggrandize himself than to inspire others.

Today, she roasted him, while he sat among those who had connected the dots among the constellation of the thousand little lies that made Jim Frey a household name -- columnists and reporters and his own editor. No fool, I'm sure that he bet on the knowledge that his appearance on the show would only garner him more publicity, and thus more readers. In a culture wrapped around its own axle, in which we delight in watching people eat worms for money, and reality shows that follow cops into drug houses where hungry babies sit on bare mattresses, he's probably right. He'll probably have more readers tomorrow, and his publisher, Doubleday, will probably be philosophical and be forced to advertise THE BOOK THAT ROCKED OPRAH'S WORLD.

On the show, Frey admitted he'd made up much of what he'd written, for the effect. As Frey would have written, in the puntuationless monotone he must believe only Great Writers use, he was a Drug Addict and a Criminal and an Alcholic and a Liar.

But, chiefly, he was a Liar. Not only of his Mama's purse, but of the common good. Frey got away with the Great Brain Robbery. And I am not so cynical as those who sip their dirty martinis and say that in this dirty world, such a thing scarcely matters, my dear.

He got millions and millions of little dollars, many from people who had struggled mightily with addicitions of their own. Some of them considered him a hero for going mano-a-mano with the demon. No sissy Twelve Steps for Jim. He did it His Way. And I am not so cynical as to tap my long, black cigar and shrug their disillusionment off, either. I am just a dumb Midwesterner, not an outlaw urban auteur with a over one arm and a gym bag over the other. But so is Jim Frey. He's a guy from Minnesota, but so was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.

You see the difference. Everyone will, in time. Frey's writerly days are over. He should invest wisely.

If Frey's "novel" had been called a "novel," it wouldn't have been a good "novel" because the writing was Pedestrian. When i say I write novels as my job, some people ask me, "Now, are those fiction?" And I say yes, fiction is the only kind of novel there is. Except for kind Frey served up.

And though Oprah Winfrey withdrew the support he had at first given him, he remains, as he so hoped to be, Famous.

He remains Famous for his defense of the Emotional Truth of his book, as if Emotional Truth could exist, as some kind of moral Beacon, on its own, in an account crammed with distortions and exaggerations.

Jim Frey now is a rich man. I personally helped out with that.

After having read the first two chapters of his book, the parts before the rat began to smell, I bought two more copies, one for each of my teen sons. A week ago, I donated those, but I should have put them to more practical uses for wastepaper.

Better still, I should have brought them back and demanded my money, as I would if I'd been sold a Chevy with a bad clutch, under the Literary Lemon Law. I encourage you to do just that.

Still, what goes around does come around. Ms. Winfrey remains a Good woman. Mr. Frey would relish being called a Bad Man (the whole book was meant to convince us that a limp kid from Minnesota was a sort of brawling, wenching, hard-bitten poet of the gutter, a modern-day Dashiell Hammett or Jack London). So I won't call him that.

He's a Silly Man. And he's a Bad Writer.

Jackie Mitchard