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Discredited memoirist James Frey got a tongue-lashing from Oprah Winfrey last week, but his problems are far from over.
A Million Little Pieces publisher Doubleday, still smarting from its initial defense of Frey's best-selling book, is running an advertisement in today's USA TODAY (page 11A) apologizing to readers.
And Riverhead, the publisher of Pieces sequel My Friend Leonard, is trying to distance itself from Frey. Riverhead is reconsidering a contract with Frey for future books and is referring inquiries about the authenticity of events in My Friend Leonard to the author.
In response to a USA TODAY inquiry, Riverhead spokeswoman Marilyn Ducksworth said in an e-mail: "Those questions are best answered by James Frey." And then Frey's personal publicist Lisa Kussell said, "We have no comments at all."
Frey told Winfrey on Thursday that the opening chapters of Leonard, in which he recounts 87 days in prison, were not true. He also admitted that a girlfriend who he writes committed suicide by hanging actually cut her wrists.
Leonard does contain the statement "Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed. Some sequences and details of events have been changed." But that might not be enough. "These are very serious issues, and we are treating them that way," Ducksworth says.
This month, Riverhead announced it had contracted with Frey for two more books, the first of which was to be a novel. Now, Ducksworth says, "the ground has shifted. It's under discussion."
Stephen Sheppard, a New York attorney who regularly deals with book contracts, says that all contracts with authors "contain provisions" and that publishers have "very extensive discretion in what they want to accept."
Meanwhile, Doubleday is attempting to "bear responsibility" for its culpability in the Million Little Pieces scandal.
The ad in today's USA TODAY, which also will run in the Feb. 6 edition of Publishers Weekly, says that future book editions will have notes from the publisher and from Frey himself and that the jacket will indicate the change. Doubleday will not publish new copies until Frey submits his "author's note."
"He's currently working on it," Doubleday's David Drake says. "And we'd like to have it as soon as possible."
Drake said Friday that the author's note would be published on the Random House website, randomhouse.com, as soon as Frey submits it. It had not been posted as of Sunday night.
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