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Do you regret your run-in with Oprah?

Jonathan Franzen Author

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

Jonathan Franzen: 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.

Question: If you could do it again, would you want to be part of her book club?

Jonathan Franzen: 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

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Jonathan Franzen Author

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Jonathan Franzen is an award-winning American novelist and essayist. Franzen was born in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Swarthmore College. He also studied on a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany. He lives on the Upper East Side of New York City, and writes for The New Yorker magazine. Franzen’s “The Corrections,” a novel of social criticism, garnered considerable critical acclaim in the United States. It became one of the best-selling works of literary fiction of the 21st century and won both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

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