<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">My year of living with Oprah</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">She can create new markets where none existed (control pants), help put an inexperienced politician into the White House (Obama) and make every American try goat’s milk. So what happened when one woman decided to live by all of Oprah Winfrey’s commands?</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma"> Chris Ayres </font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana">Think back, for a moment, to your most recent bowel movement. Did you examine the contents of the lavatory before flushing? Did you observe an “S” shape in your stool? No? Well, there is a woman in Chicago who will be extremely disappointed to hear that, and her name is Oprah Winfrey. Yes, Oprah cares about the shape of your poop. Not just the shape of it, but its colour (you’re aiming for a chocolate brown), and – this is crucial – the sound it makes when it hits the water. Plop, plop, plop: bad. Swoosh: good.

And that’s just the beginning of what the 56-year-old billionaire media empress thinks is healthy for you. Indeed, for the tens of millions who tune in regularly to The Oprah Winfrey Show – which has been broadcast every weekday in the US for the past 24 years – the Queen of Daytime Television has become so much more than just a provider of mid-market tabloid entertainment. She is a doctor, shrink, interior designer, sex therapist, wardrobe consultant, fitness coach, financial guru, nutritionist, professor, spiritual mentor. In 2,000 years’ time, it is not inconceivable that some future race of post-apocalypse humanoids might come across the relics of a taped season of Oprah and form an entire religion around S-shaped stool production, the 21-Day Vegan Cleanse Diet and Easy Ways to Conquer Clutter.

Yet in many ways, Oprah, with her all-encompassing marketing mantra of Live Your Best Life, already is a religion. When an edict is issued from her studio stage – “Oprah Wants Everyone to Taste Moon Pie!” – several million Americans, mostly women, do exactly what is demanded of them. This so-called “Oprah effect” is quite staggering in its power: it can turn woolly self-help books into overnight megasellers (The Secret by Rhonda Byrne), create new markets where none existed (control pants), and help put inspirational but inexperienced politicians into the highest office of the land (Barack Obama).

And The Oprah Winfrey Show isn’t the broadcaster’s only control medium, not by a long shot. Her company, Harpo Productions (the name is “Oprah” spelt backwards), also produces the mighty oprah.com website, not to mention a magazine, O, which sells two million-plus copies a month. (Some celebrities are famous enough to be known only by their first name: Oprah needs only a single letter, which, at some point, she might very well purchase for the exclusive rights.)

Curiously, as Oprah’s power has grown over the years, so too has her physical size, to the point where her giant, frowning visage now resembles that of some mythic, pre-Christian deity. And mercy upon those who smite this redoubtable creature! For example: when Oprah made an unexpected visit in 2005 to the Hermès designer boutique in Paris after it had closed for the evening, and wasn’t allowed inside – even though the French shop assistant recognised her – she visited biblical-scale wrath upon the company’s US president, who was reduced to a quivering, apologetic crater of a human being in her Chicago studio. Of course, the man didn’t have to go on the show – he could have simply lived with the charges of racism and let his company go to ruin. Likewise, when Oprah promoted James Frey’s predictably exaggerated memoir A Million Little Pieces only to discover – the outrage! – that large sections of it were fantasy, the author was duly summoned for the modern-day equivalent of a public disembowelling.

Regardless of such uncomfortable spectacles, or perhaps because of them, Oprah has for the most part escaped the attention of entrepreneurial detractors – the kind of media manure flies who see great concentrations of wealth and influence and fly toward them, ready to feast. People like Michael Moore, in other words, who excoriated General Motors (and its boss at the time, Roger Smith) in his documentary Roger & Me, or Morgan Spurlock, who did the same to McDonald’s, simply by consuming its products, via the ingenious stunt that was Super Size Me.

No doubt this is because Oprah, survivor of rape, poverty and segregation, is such an obviously inspirational and sympathetic character. After all, she not only gives vast sums of money to philanthropic organisations, but also once rewarded every single member of her screaming, bawling, control pant-wetting studio audience with a free £17,500 car. Perhaps another reason why she has proved so immune to high-profile criticism is because media manure flies tend to be righteous liberals, and, as far as they’re concerned, Oprah is one of them.

But then along came a woman named Robyn Okrant. And the rules suddenly changed.

It’s a sub-zero January morning in Chicago – the roads still aren’t clear after overnight snow – when I visit Okrant in her dilapidated upper-level flat on the city’s North Side. It was here, with the help of nothing but a computer, an Eighties-vintage television set and a similarly ancient VCR, that Okrant carried out a project that dared to poke fun at the very concept of Oprah-as-spiritual-guru, eventually building an audience for herself that could rival that of a major national newspaper.

The gimmick was straightforward enough.For a year beginning in 2008, Okrant, then 35, simply did everything that Oprah instructed via her show, website and magazine, and maintained a blog, entitled Living Oprah, that detailed both the costs and the results. As stunts go, it was brilliant, although to be fair not entirely original, given the author Julie Powell’s blog of a few years ago, in which she attempted to cook all 524 recipes from a Julia Child cookbook, also over the course of a year. (The blog inspired the movie Julie & Julia).

“I’m a little OCD,” laughs Okrant, as she sits amid newly delivered boxes of her forthcoming memoir, also entitled Living Oprah. “And I’m definitely intense. And stubborn.”

Is that how she managed to pull off such a monomaniacal undertaking? “Coming from a theatre background, I think my training in putting on productions allowed me to let my personal life slide for a while. Of course, with a theatre production, it’s usually only a few weeks that you’re giving up? It turned out I could apply that to a whole year as well.”

Okrant, a boho-nerd with a finger-in-the-lightsocket hairdo (she calls it her “Jewfro”), certainly doesn’t do things by halves. Indeed, she accounted for every expense during her year of Living Oprah with such detail, it’s recorded down to the last cent. Funds were supplied by her husband Jim, a tile maker, and her job teaching yoga.

You can’t fault the dedication. Acting on every single directive issued by the Oprah Secretariat for 52 straight weeks, the items bought or otherwise procured by Okrant included a weighted vest, a panini maker, white jeans, a fabulous chair (every room needs one!), and a fire pit – all while she adhered to other key Oprah edicts, such as making sure to compliment her spouse frequently, having sex in unusual locations, tailoring her clothes, savouring every bite, loving her vulva, producing S-shaped poops, embracing the pseudoscientific codswallop of the Law of Attraction (ie, positive thinking), taking a New Age webinar (web-based seminar), building a “vision board”, wearing leopard-print flats, removing the TV from her bedroom, dining on homemade turkey burgers (at nearly £20 each), switching to fluorescent lightbulbs, and abstaining from using paper household products.

As all this unfolds in the book, it has to be said that Okrant occasionally comes across as just a bloody-minded literalist, as when she buys the fire pit without having any outdoor space – surely a deliberate misinterpretation of what Oprah meant, and not “performance art” designed to show the folly of one-size-fits-all, as Okrant claims. Likewise, Okrant sounds whining when she reads O magazine and complains that, “It made me very aware of what I can’t have,” because it showcased a pair of $178 jeans. The fact is that she’s an educated woman who could earn money to buy the jeans by getting a job, or at least a job that doesn’t involve teaching yoga or writing a free blog.

But it’s the big-picture analysis of Oprah’s advice that makes the strongest impression, especially when Okrant compares individual directives with the often outrageously contradictory behaviour of Winfrey herself. Indeed, the portrait that emerges of Oprah is of a rather sinister figure, who will sell you a £2,500 luxury refrigerator on one show, and then, on the next, sign you up for a “live on less” financial workout. (In one of her best moments, Okrant compares Oprah’s promotion of Suze Orman, the financial adviser, to the cigarette company Philip Morris’s promotion of its QuitAssist programme.)

To take just one example of Oprah selling both the poison and the cure: during a show in January 2008, the broadcaster urged her viewers to enter into a Best Life Challenge pact, complete with promises to eat healthily and lose weight. Yet the very next day she was shown raving about – and eating – a pumpkin, pecan and caramel ice cream from the Cold Stone Creamery. Likewise, Oprah endorsed a book entitled A New Earth about learning to connect with people on an authentic level, then made an inch-deep feature about Mariah Carey’s lingerie. Of course, such contradictions are part of human nature: Oprah is simply able to exploit them in a terrifyingly lucrative way.

Predictably, Okrant initially didn’t get very far by pointing out any of this on her blog. Who the hell cared what she thought, anyhow? The race factor also brought an uncomfortable dimension to the criticism. If you’re privileged and white, why pick on a woman who grew up in the shadow of slavery, so poor her grandmother dressed her in sackcloth, and a victim of multiple childhood rape (the first of which happened when she was 9) who has gone on to build a hugely successful empire based on providing people with help and advice?

Okrant acknowledges the delicacy, but says: “A lot of white women, me included, feel like Oprah transcends the idea of race.” Besides, Okrant isn’t your typical white critic: the daughter of a college professor and high-school teacher, she was raised as pretty much the only Jewish kid in ultra-conservative Plymouth, New Hampshire, where classmates called her “the n-word for black people” and drew swastikas on her school books. “They didn’t know what to do with the Jewish kid at Christmas,” recalls Okrant, “so they gave me some blue paper to make a Star of David, and then I had a Star of David hanging over my desk.”

Okrant left for Vermont, where she enrolled at Bennington, one of the most expensive colleges in the US, graduating in drama. It was then that she moved to Chicago, taking odd jobs to pay the rent while volunteering with theatre groups. One act she created was a satirical self-help group named Masterz in Motion.

Nevertheless, Okrant insists her intention with Living Oprah wasn’t to parody the talk-show host. “I felt like that would have been the easy route for me,” she says, adding that she wanted to study the effect of the Oprah media phenomenon. But it was the gimmick that got people’s attention.

Okrant knew she was on to something when the e-mails began. Just a handful a week at first. Then ten or twenty. Then more than 100 every 24 hours. Meanwhile, the number of unique users visiting Okrant’s website kept growing exponentially until it reached its peak of 500,000. When the national press started to call, Okrant was forced to give up her anonymity, and before long she was being interviewed by Matt Lauer on the Today show – as big as media exposure in the US gets, barring an Oprah appearance. Indeed, it was the Today show appearance that finally prompted Oprah to break her silence. “Her blog takes a novel approach to being a fan,” she said of Okrant in a statement, which seemed either delusional or disingenuous, perhaps both. “She certainly takes brand dedication to a whole new level.”

Okrant insists that neither she nor her husband ever expected such attention, even though she once posed as a Star Trek fanatic to get into the taping of an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, thus getting herself on television. At best, says Okrant, she hoped to get a one-woman theatre production out of the Living Oprah project. “I think we were both just really naive about what was going to happen,” she shrugs. “It just seemed really exciting and positive. We didn’t see any danger.”

Then, ten months into the blog, came a knock at the door. Oprah, it turned out, had found out where her nemesis lived. Not only that, but she had a gift.

“Wanted to save you a few dollars on this one,” read Oprah’s signed note, which the courier handed to Okrant along with a package. “Thanks for watching.”

Inside the package was an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, worth £225, plus a download gift certificate for £60. Was it an attempt by Oprah to compromise Okrant, a kind of Mob favour, to be repaid in some undefined way at a future date? Or a sincere act of generosity? Okrant didn’t wait to find out. She sent it back, along with an apologetic note, although in many ways Oprah had already done the favour, by giving Okrant by far the most dramatic material in both her blog and her book. “I don’t know what her intentions were,” says Okrant. “All I know is that it made me uncomfortable.”

Oprah never got in touch again, perhaps realising that Okrant wasn’t an ally and therefore wasn’t worth promoting, but also wasn’t worth shutting down, either. You get the sense that Okrant is both disappointed and relieved by this turn of events: disappointed never to meet the person she spent a year idolising, and relieved to be spared the James Frey treatment. “The thought of that kept me honest,” she admits. “That’s why I have copious detailed notes. If someone doubted me, I told myself, there at least couldn’t be any doubt about my veracity.”

Nevertheless, the purity of Okrant’s blog, which had no advertising, soon disappeared when she signed a publishing deal: especially given that her book not only trades off the word “Oprah” in the title, but is also presented with a giant “O” on the cover, as if it were official merchandise. At the same time, while Okrant was happy to detail every decimal point of what she spent on her blog project, she won’t reveal how much she earned from the advance – although it was enough for the down payment on a new apartment. Given all this, Okrant should probably have just kept the Kindle. It didn’t exactly matter in the end.

Compromised or not, though, the blog certainly seems to mark a change in America’s attitude towards Oprah. She is still greatly admired, of course. But she’s become the Establishment. Which means she’s no longer as off-limits as she used to be. The talk-show host faced serious criticism for her support of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential race, for example, even though she claimed to be doing it as a private individual. She has also recently been disqualified from winning an Oscar for the film Precious, of which she’s an executive producer. The rare move was provoked by Oprah signing on to the movie after it was made, which means her role is essentially limited to that of celebrity endorser. Some black critics, meanwhile, have accused Precious of peddling racist stereotypes to white audiences. As if in response to all this, Oprah has announced that she will give up her show in 2011, 25 years after it first achieved national syndication in 1986, to focus on launching her cable channel, OWN. Did Living Oprah help make up her mind? It seems unlikely, but then again?

And what of Okrant’s conclusions about the talk-show host? In her book they are mostly hedged, infuriatingly so at times, although she is willing to say that, “Oprah devalues women by focusing so much on our bodies,” and that lessons on spirituality are best not delivered in a format that requires the funding of commercial advertisers. Okrant also expresses frustration about Oprah’s lectures on saving the planet, or vegan cleanse diets, when she flies by private jet and employs a personal chef. Ironically enough, these are peeves shared by a good number of Republicans, albeit for different reasons. But what about Oprah’s successes? What about the advice that’s actually worth following? Complimenting her husband was a good idea, says Okrant, and the turkey burgers were delicious, if expensive. Alas, the S-shaped stool proved to be more troublesome. “You have to eat in a certain way,” she advises. “Lots of fibre and water and fish oils. For a while I was just getting ‘C’ shapes, although even that I was pretty proud of.”

But did it ever happen? Did she ever produce a bowl movement worthy of her Best Life? “I made one,” she sighs. “It was a good day.”

© Robyn Okrant 2010. Extracted from Living Oprah, distributed by Little, Brown Book for Center Street on February 4 at £17.99</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article7001662.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1</font></b></span></p>

i have folloed the blog for some time now, its rather amazing.

i have folloed the blog for some time now, its rather amazing.

I have just heard about it.

So, in your view, it's worth following (ie. the book worth reading)?

I have just heard about it.

Me too.

Seems rather fascinating.

Edited January 29, 201015 yr by YRBB

I have just heard about it.

So, in your view, it's worth following (ie. the book worth reading)?

I dont know about the book, but i loved the blod and was simi-obsessed for a few months.

I would check it out.Its a very interesting project.