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