How Oprah Winfrey knew it was time to end her talk show: ‘It was getting harder and harder to find myself sitting in a seat of truth’

Oprah Winfrey has received plenty of offers to write a memoir — but one thing stopped the media mogul from following through.

In a discussion with Gayle King at the Massachusetts Conference for Women in Boston on Dec. 12, Winfrey spoke candidly about why she never went through with it.

“There have been many times where I thought about writing before and did not. I’ve had contracts to do it. It’s a serious business. I take books very seriously. I would say for a long time I didn’t do it because my mother was living. I’d started a memoir, and Stedman [Graham, her long-term partner] said, ‘You shouldn’t say that about your mother.’ All I was saying was that I never felt loved. And he was saying, ‘That’s gonna hurt your family,'” she explained.

“After I became Oprah with a capital O, she had a revisionist idea of history. She said, ‘We didn’t have much, but we sure had love,'” Winfrey said, making a face that demonstrated she disagreed. “So I haven’t written a memoir.”

King asked whether Winfrey would finally pursue writing a memoir now. (Winfrey’s mother died in 2018.)

“I’m not even thinking about it,” she said.

Winfrey concluded The Oprah Winfrey Show after 25 seasons in May 2011. When King asked whether Winfrey wished she was still on TV “on a daily basis,” the former host was clear that ending her show at the time was the right choice, even though it would have been incredibly lucrative to keep it going.

“No. Daily? No,” Winfrey said, explaining that she genuinely felt it was time to bring the show to an end. “If I had signed another contract, I would have made, minimum, another billion dollars doing that.”

After sending her entire 300-person audience on a trip to Australia in 2010, Winfrey found herself in an endless loop, trying to top each surprise.

“When I ended the Oprah show, I knew it was time to end it. I could feel that coming for at least four to five years. It was getting to the point where I needed to bring it to an end, because it was getting harder and harder to find myself sitting in a seat of truth. I mean, every year, we were trying to outdo ourselves, and I knew we were in trouble. We literally had taken the entire audience to Australia,” Winfrey recalled. “After that, one of the producers came to me and said, ‘What if we can get, like 10 audience members on a spaceship?’ You’re always trying to do the thing, do the thing, do the thing that’s going to top the thing that you’ve done.”

While she doesn’t have as regimented a schedule as she did in her talk show days, Winfrey said she enjoys the flexibility. She has launched a new podcast, The Oprah Podcast, in which she speaks with a diverse range of notable individuals. She’s even planning to learn how to cross-country ski.

“Anything you think when you think about, ‘I wonder what it’s like to be Oprah’,” she said. “It’s 100 times better than that.”

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