REVIEW: 'Oprah' by Kitty Kelly

"One of the side-effects of sexual abuse can be a notorious boundary-lessness. Their own privacy trespassed against, the victims unwittingly undervalue the privacy of others — almost a job requirement in a chat show host. While Phil Donahue conducted his talk show as if giving a civics class, Oprah elbowed her way into living rooms with a selection of devil-worshippers, transexuals and housewife prostitutes, once asking a porn star “Don’t you get sore?”. Kelly’s attempts to gin up outrage over this feels a little stale; compared to the personalities who were to follow in her wake — the foghorn-lunged Rosie O’ Donnell, the sleek, lethal Tyra Banks — Oprah’s husky warmth feels suspiciously like the real thing. “The therapy I never had,” she said of her show, although just how her guests feel afterwards about confessing their secrets on national television is never known. They are all contractually obliged to keep their silence about the experience — the opposite of therapy, surely." — from my review of Oprah by Kitty Kelly in London's Evening Standard