Conflate, inflate, deflate, he-flate, she-flate

I looked it up in Wikipedia, that unassailable source of truth, and it said something like "to bring together, mold or fuse." This isn't the kind of word you use every day in polite company ("Let's conflate our wedding plans, shall we, dear?"), but it crops up once in a while, and I just enjoyed a particularly interesting (to me, anyway) example of it.

The internet long ago molded or fused with my hazy memory of old book titles, things so out of print you used to have to dredge them up in rare book stores for hundreds of dollars. Now they're lying around in Amazon for one cent (I'm not kidding - I guess they're in a warehouse somewhere and they just want to get rid of them). I buy most of my used books this way, paying only the shipping and handling.

As long as they hold together, they're OK by me. When they come, I get to smell that musty butter/bug/shelf smell of yellowed, slightly crumbly paper again, the Book Smell that will very soon become obsolete (not that anybody cares). I get to read books that in the 30 years since I've read them have mysteriously turned to

dust.

The only down side is that sometimes I only remember part of a title, or part of an author's name, or assign the wrong author to a title. This necessitates a tangle of detective work that would be impossible without the net.

The other night I was propped up in bed reading the Oprah bio by Kitty Kelley - a nice, fishy dish of Meow Mix that makes perfect bedtime reading as a slice of modern-day mythology. Kelley kept referring to an author named Gloria Naylor, who had written The Women of Brewster Place (later made into an Oprah TV

miniseries).

I kept thinking: Naylor. Naylor. Naylor.

Naylor was the name of an author I used to read, oh, eons ago! Didn't she write a book called Psyche, all about a little girl who had been abducted? I tried to find it. Naylor, Naylor, Psyche. You can imagine what I found under "psyche": a host of bafflegab about the human "mind", "soul" or whatever it is that floats in the air around us, completely independent of the brain. There must've been thousands of entries about "the psyche", but no mention of Naylor.

Then: pay dirt! On my millionth try, I found the name Phyllis Brett Young, and her hundredth book, written in the '60s, was called Psyche. Nothing at all to do with Naylor, for sure, but at least I had her name and knew I wasn't imagining the book.

But another title kept nagging at me, and I was sure it had been written by the same author.

It was called Revelations, a well-written novel about a young woman growing up in a rural Fundamentalist family who has a secret affair with a phony evangelical preacher. I remember a couple of things about it: one, that the main character's nasty older sister at one point exclaimed, "There's hay on her back!", and two, it said on the cover, "Soon to be a major motion picture starring Sally Field!"

Hot on the trail of Phyllis Brett Young, I googled Revelations, and found even more stuff that wasn't relevant at all. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of books called Revelations, including the book of Revelations. I was lost in the world of defunct novels, at a dead end.

Then I thought back. Gloria Naylor. Phyllis Brett Young. Was it possible that I had, well, not quite conflated but somehow de-conflated the two? In muddling around the 'net, I came across a name that finally rang the bell: Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

Yes, there was a Phyllis, and a Naylor, and they belonged

together!

Phyllis Naylor turned out to be an incredibly prolific children's/young adult author who had somehow popped out this novel during her spare time. It was listed under used books in a million places (and I ordered one, lusting after that musty antique smell), but when I found lists of all the things she'd written (over 200),

Revelations wasn't there.

At the same time, I know it was the same Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. I think the busted movie deal must've caused her to want to bury the book. It's too bad, because though it's simply written, it has a heart, exploring a delayed awakening of sexuality in an honest, compassionate way.

I wonder what got in the way of the movie. Sally Field would've been around 30 or 35, the perfect age for the "spinster" who stayed at home to look after Grandpa after his stroke. Sally Field doesn't get enough play these days except in Boniva commercials (you know, for menopausal women whose bones are crumbling away to dust). I remember her ferocity in Norma Rae, jumping on her desk with that piece of cardboard that said, "Strike!".

Sam Shepard could have played the preacher, natch. It would have worked. Do they do that in Hollywood: blare it around before anything is signed? Or WAS it signed, and fell through? I wonder how many sure things fall

through in Tinseltown.

Anyway, from Gloria Naylor, to Phyllis Brett Young, to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. This sounds like six degrees of separation. But I like conflation better, with its sense of blowing up some vast balloon or iridescent bubble of the imagination.

Eat Pray Love God Food: And Oprah Created Women

Is it my imagination, or does Oprah regularly decide to Change her Life by slavishly following a new guru, then replacing him/her once she gets tired of them and the bloom is off?

I just remember people like Sarah Ban Breathnach (who?), a lifestyle coach who used to come on regularly (but, unlike the male gurus, didn't get her own show). I wonder if she's still around, coasting on all that former glory, or languishing in remainder bins next to John Bradshaw.

OK, so this time Oprah tells us she has Found the Secret to weight loss and "food issues". And this time, boy, she really means it! I mean, really really really. It's all in this book by Geneen Roth, a formerly fat self-help/bestseller writer who has revealed an astounding fact: overeating, and food/weight problems in general, are often connected to larger emotional and spiritual issues.

Never having heard it before, Oprah was all over this idea like a mess of mashed potatoes with sausage gravy. In fact, during her "interview" with Geneen Roth yesterday, she monologued for 15 or 20 minutes about her own food problems, while Roth sat there nodding and saying "yes. . . yes. . . yes. . . ", her face arranged in what she hoped was a compassionate expression.

Food is tied to emotional issues? Ack! Oprah isn't the only one drooling over this thing, which is selling wildly, much as Women who Run with the Wolves did about a decade ago. (Take another look at that one and see if if it doesn't embarrass you.) Someone has been paying well-known self-help authors to salivate all over this book, or they wouldn't be praising a rival like this:

"Geneen Roth does it again! Women Food and God is absolutely mesmerizing. And loaded with insights which can change your life." - Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause

"This is a hugely important work, a life-changer, one that will free untold women from the tyranny of fear and hopelessness around their bodies." - Anne Lamott, professional confessor/so-called counsellor/recovering sitdown comedienne.

OK, so obviously I don't feel very good about this book. Actually, it's not the book, and it's not even Oprah telling us the book has led her to "epiphany after epiphany" about making the connection between eating and emotional stress.

It's the fact that we've heard it all before, ad nauseam. All the elements get scrambled around, and the face of the author (usually compassionate and spiritual - and by the way, none of them are fat) changes with the seasons. Oprah leads the parade, beating her vast drum and insisting that this book, this author is the one who represents the one true religion about fat.

I feel sorry for Oprah, I really do. I think she is a sad woman who lost touch with herself long ago, and is now trapped in a kind of bizarre media godhood (goddess-hood?). What she says, goes. My prediction is that she will soon enter politics, and if a B-movie actor or a peanut farmer can make it to the Presidency, so can she.

I've been rather guiltily reading another best-seller, the Kitty Kelley tell-all bio, Oprah. It's not particularly charitable, but at the same time it's believable: the Big O has become a media behemoth, her ambition fuelled by a desperate attempt to outrun her traumatized past.

Much has been made of the fact that O has never had therapy, insisting that public confession is enough to heal her wounds. Her Kirstie-Alley-esque weight-bounces are beside the fact. But then again. . . Why this thundering response to a book that seems so self-evident? The Oprah who used to preach sermons when she was three (oh, maybe five) has stepped up to the pulpit again, insisting that THIS TIME we have found the answer. Not by dieting, not by agonizing or weighing, not even by joining Jenny Craig (like a lot of her "successful" guests). But by becoming spiritually aware. By realizing that we need to embrace the things we hate and fear the most.

OK: I have a few things that are hard to embrace.

Environmental meltdown. Oil spills. Random, vicious violence. All those little school children hacked to death in China. Drugs. Waste. The capricious, often horrendous turns of fate that can derail a human being for life. Cancer. Suffering. Pain of all kinds.

Global warming? You get the idea.

Even the things that lurk in my own psyche (jealousy, lust, anger, violent mood swings, loneliness, despair) are pretty gol-dern hard to embrace. I can't really see how embracing them will help. But then, I don't have a book on the bestseller list.

I predict that within one year, or maybe two, Oprah's miraculous weight loss under the Roth banner will have bounced again. And she will once again be fishing for people who insist they have discovered The Secret.

Speaking of, wasn't there a book by exactly that name that Oprah touted not so long ago? Its main premise was that you can get anything you want - anything - just by wanting it badly enough. A woman wrote in to Oprah claming that she had cured her breast cancer this way (prompting the producers to send her a frantic note).

Then came the news headline: this particular guru, James Ray (no relation to James Earl Ray) had been performing endurance tests on his disciples, including an extremely hot sweat-lodge that caught fire, killing several people.

The answer? I'm not even sure I know the question yet.