The Stories of O

By Judith Shulevitz

The remarkable thing about O: The Oprah Magazine, which appears on newsstands this week, is that it is an Oprah experience from start to finish. In a personal guarantee of the brand, the television superstar graces the cover, as she plans to do for every issue in the foreseeable future. Inside the 318-page premiere issue (including 166 pages of ads) is a literary experience consistent with The Oprah Winfrey Show, with the daily outpourings of emotion transposed into the more staid mode of confessional narrative. Tale after tale records the triumphs of women (ordinary women, mostly; who needs celebrities when you have Oprah?) over poverty, traumas, racism, even sexual commodification. One article offers the inspiring story of a model who found happiness by going into business for herself designing china. Another is the memoir of a Korean War orphan whose mother was killed for refusing to sell her half-American daughter into slavery. And since Oprah has never been content with mere voyeurism, O is also a workbook wherein you can apply what you learn. Some pages have blank spaces for writing down the things you'd like to change about yourself or postcards with sage quotations that can be torn out along perforated lines and taped to the refrigerator.

O, in short, stands for Oprah--heartfelt, improving and mysteriously able to transform the commercial exploitation of bathos into a unique blend of self-help spirituality, pop feminism and Benjamin Franklin optimism. "You always have the potential to get better," writes Oprah in her introduction. "That, as I see it, is one of the purposes of your life: Not to be good but continuously to get better, to constantly move forward, to create the highest, grandest vision and to be led by that vision every day."

Commercial women's magazines are famous for defeating efforts to alter their standard formula, but none have ever encountered an editorial director who is also the host of an enormously popular women's magazine-on-the-air. O, a joint venture of Oprah's Harpo Entertainment Group and Hearst Magazines (which is printing 1 million copies of the first issue), is produced in New York City by a staff headed by editor in chief Ellen Kunes. A small, quiet, blond woman rendered even paler by the fluorescent bulbs of her office, Kunes was explaining the magazine last week with the careful blandness of a woman alert to the wiles of print journalists, when a loud voice called from down the hall. This was Gayle King, O's editor at large and, more important, Oprah's best friend. King, a former TV-news anchor, is charged with ensuring that Oprah's voice is heard at every key editorial turning point. As King strode in and handily usurped the interview, she demonstrated how defenseless the magazine professionals must have felt in the face of the combined force of Winfrey and King.

Though Oprah, based in Chicago, is rarely seen in the O offices, she intervened often in the editing process, peppering King with ideas, demanding changes when she found some helpful hint too condescendingly obvious, and insisting that the table of contents come at the very beginning of the magazine instead of after pages and pages of advertising, as in most glossy monthlies. Oprah tried on every fashion item featured in the magazine's "O List," according to King. "She won't recommend something she hasn't tried herself," says King. "There's one list in which you have a bag of potato chips next to a $250 pair of shoes. That's very Oprah."

But Oprah's influence on her magazine transcends attention to detail. O is peopled with her extended network of powerful individuals and talk-show guests. A centerpiece of the premiere issue is an interview conducted by Oprah with Camille Cosby--wife of Bill Cosby, grieving mother of the murdered Ennis Cosby and, of course, Oprah's close personal friend. O's financial, health, relationship and spiritual experts (Suze Orman, Bob Greene, Philip McGraw, Gary Zukav) are all frequent guests on Oprah's show.

Oprah's presence is felt in other, more subtle ways. The majority of the articles in the magazine's feature section were written by women of color, from pieces by freelance journalists to biracial novelist Danzy Senna's account of her troubled relationship with her Irish grandmother. Writes Oprah: "This is the defining question in my life. How do you use your life to best serve yourself and extend it to the world?" Once again, she has served herself by extending her self-service to the world, and what would probably come off as self-aggrandizement anywhere else in this case just looks like intelligent packaging.

Judith Shulevitz is the cultural correspondent for Slate www.Slate.com