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