Much inkage spilled over the James Frey business over the last week, but I was struck by the last two paragraphs in Meghan O’Rourke’s take in Slate

The fact is, doubts were raised about the accuracy of Frey’s memoir from the start, both in reviews and in cocktail party chatter. And people have long believed that LeRoy was, in some fashion, the invention of another writer. So who is now shocked, shocked that dissembling is going on here? Not Doubleday, which continues to endorse its author. Not Oprah, if you caught her call-in during James Frey’s exclusive interview with Larry King this week, to tell viewers that the "underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me, and I know it still resonates with millions of other people who will read this book." It was a perfectly scripted "unscripted" media moment. Her message summed up the reigning ethos, in which the once-opposed cultural vocabularies of therapeutic authenticity and postmodern subjectivity fuse: If a book moves you, it’s true.

Ours, it seems, is a cultural landscape in which emotional "honesty" is alchemized into an artistic truth, and every reader gets to decide for himself whether the inherent artifice of the story matters to him—all while writers themselves cynically (and correctly) presume that most readers have no investment in what a purist might call "artistic merit" in the first place. We want to be surprised by the revelation of these fabrications, because if we were truly surprised, it’d mean that we care about truth in the first place. But in the end, it looks like the media hysteria is inspired less by our feeling "conned" by Frey and LeRoy, and more by a need for a cathartic public debate that will leave everyone feeling happy: a Salem witch hunt where no one is burned at the stake.

Not just art, Meghan – religion, too. Haven’t you noticed? Since we have decided that God is just too unknowable and too big and vague, religious "truth" is no more, except as an emotional response. If a religious experience moves you, it’s true. Now, is that always a false conclusion? No, but the, uh, truth is, that emotional responses are physical and not necessarily related to the truth of a situation. Think about your own emotional responses to situations – particularly angry ones. Is the true nature of the event or its objective importance accurately measured by your response, each and every time? Nah. Ask any parent of a toddler.