I urged readers to self-publish, as I do, instead. It was great.In my book How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book, I denounced the so-called real publishers up one side and down the other. The Million Little Pieces controversy really freed me to be as radical as I want, to break every rule I want, and to not have to care what other people thought.

Even at this point in my career I publish my books how I want, you know, I don’t publish through conventional publishers anymore. What means something to me is telling a story in the way I think is the right way to do it, and if I need to use factual elements or fictional elements or things that live in the gray area between, if I have to use grammar of my own invention, if I have to lay the pages out. The expectations and rules and conventions of the literary community or the publishing community or society in general mean absolutely nothing to me. I don’t write novels or memoirs or, you know, narrative non-fiction. Since then, I’ve literally done what I want. I got kicked out of a club I didn’t want to be a part of, and it was awesome. You know, from that point forward I was free. I always knew I wasn’t born to work in that system, and I won’t ever do it again. I wrote a book that wasn’t what it was published as. I was, like, I had to work within your system.

When the controversy blew up and I was sort of written off by the publishing business and by the literary community, instead of being upset about it I was kind of excited. We didn’t submit it to publishers as memoirs, even though it was published as one. You know, I didn’t write that book as a memoir. That book coming out and the controversies related to it were obviously a big moment for me probably not in the ways people might think. This is the voice I’ve always been trying to find.

This is what I’ve always, this is how I’ve always been trying to write. At the end of it I looked at those pages and I was, like, I did it. And so I kept going, and over the course of a couple days I wrote probably the first fifteen or twenty pages of it. It felt more right than anything I had ever written. The first time I started writing A Million Little Pieces I’d been searching for a voice for years and years and years, and one day I sat down and I started writing that book, and I wrote the first sentence.

A million little things oprah