Penn Group

Barbara Walters continues to tear the book world asunder with her memoir, Audition.

First, the New York Times ran its review of the book early, in spite of the fact that Knopf warned news outlets not to publish reviews before May 6. Now, journalists, including Doree Schafrir of the Observer, are angry that the Times managed to get its piece in before anyone else.

Lit blogger Seth Godin, however, is angry that the Times is covering Walters, period - he claims that, by running three pieces on Audition, they’re denying more obscure writers much-needed publicity.  To be fair, we never considered writing a blog post about Seth Godin until he started complaining about Barbara Walters coverage, so it can’t be all that bad.

The furor surrounding reviews of Audition is almost enough to drown out Star Jones’s fury over the book itself. Lest we forget, Barbara claims that Star was “so obese that she could barely walk onto the View set,” and fired her because she wouldn’t talk about her gastric bypass on the show. Star has a few choice words, which she chose to convey through US magazine:

“It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters, in the sunset of her life, is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book. It speaks to her true character.”

To be honest, all of this fussing and feuding is almost enough to make us want to buy the book. Also, we’re touching up our own memoirs to make them more offensive - when people start shouting about your book in public, it’s better for sales than any “book trailer” yet produced.