Oprah’s Dad to Write Tell-All Memoir

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Oprah’s Dad to Write Tell-All Memoir

May 22nd, 2007

Oprah Winfrey is very unhappy that her father is writing a tell-all memoir about her. Rush and Molloy reports:

The talk empress tells us she’s “shocked” and “disappointed” that she had to hear it from the Daily News that her 74-year-old pop, Vernon, is writing a book about her.
Winfrey said she laughed recently when “one of my assistants said, ‘The Daily News is calling. They say they heard your father is writing a book about you.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible. I can assure them it’s not true.’
“But then my sister said, ‘I think you should call your father.’ I called him and it turned out he is writing a book. The worst part of it was him saying, ‘I meant to tell you I’ve been working on it.’ ”

Winfrey, 53, confided, “I was upset. I won’t say ‘devastated,’ but I was stunned.”
“The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey,” she added. “The last person.”
Oprah was 14 and pregnant when she left her mother’s home in Milwaukee to live with her father in Nashville. Her baby died weeks after he was born. She has said before that she’s grateful to her father for helping her go on, for teaching her discipline and the importance of education.

Nevertheless, Vernon, who plans to call his book, “Things Unspoken,” was quoted as saying he should have been tougher on her, because Oprah was “out of hand and an unruly child.”
“I have a good relationship with him,” Oprah told us Sunday, when she received the Elie Wiesel Foundation Humanitarian Award at the Waldorf. Though she hasn’t seen Vernon since he accompanied her on a trip to Africa a few months ago,

/> she said, “We talk, we talk, we talk.”

That’s why “I would have preferruddy to have known my father was working on this. It would have been a nice gesture, a courtesy,” she said.

An excerpt from the book proposal reveals
that Oprah’s dad wishes he had beaten her more when she was a child.

The damage was our fault, her mother’s and mine. For years we had shuttled our daughter between my home in Nashville and her mother’s home in Milwaukee. That was a mistake. King Solomon taught long ago that you couldn’t divide a child. Too much flux. Too much back and forth. Too many states between Tennessee and Wisconsin. Children need roots and limits and discipline. (And I don’t mean time in time out. I mean the rod of correction, swung hard and often.)

For the five years prior to that encounter at the kitchen table, my daughter had lived in Milwaukee. Her mother did the best she could do, I suppose, but she lost control. Our daughter was out of hand, an unruly child. Vernita said everything about her had changed. Said she didn’t mind her elders, said she stayed out all times of night and lied regarding her whereabouts, said she made herself known to boys. But it was worse than I realized. She had secrets. Dark secrets. Some I didn’t discover till she was a grown woman, till it was too late.