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Apr 15 2008 11:39AM EDT

Franzen on Oprah Row: 'What Does Regret Mean?'

If Jonathan Franzen has any regrets about ticking off Oprah Winfrey and getting The Corrections yanked off her book club list, he still can't bring himself to say so, except in the most hyper-intellectualized and roundabout of ways.

"What does regret mean?" muses the author in a new video interview posted by Big Think. "Yeah, sure, as a writer you regret how long it takes you to fully figure out what the real situation was, and I wanna rewrite it in my head and know the whole thing, rather than only part of it."

"It's not like I wasn't trying to very hard to do my best," he adds. "Some of these things just have to play out the way they play out."

Why do I suspect his publisher might see things differently?

But Franzen did have words he seemed to think were conciliatory for Winfrey, who was clearly affronted when Franzen sniffed at the indignity of having a "corporate logo" placed on his book. Here's his peace offering, such as it is:


"You know, the world kind of divides into people that have one opinion of Oprah Winfrey and people who have kind of a diametrically opposite opinion. That's a remarkable thing to achieve, to divide the world in two, you're sort of parting the seas. I think...I feel some confidence she'd be comfortable with the magnitude of that image."

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