Author’s year of ‘Living Oprah’ was quite enough - Entertainment, Books - Army Times

Author’s year of ‘Living Oprah’ was quite enough

Oprah Winfrey calls it living your “best life.” So Robyn Okrant decided to live hers by the talk-show queen’s dictates for a full year.

In 2008, Okrant followed every piece of advice offered by Oprah on her show, her Web site and her magazine, O — from what to wear (leopard flats) to what to buy (chairs) to what to eat (turkey burgers).

Now she’s sharing her story in a book out today, “Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk” (Center Street/Hachette Book Group, 257 pp., $24.99).

Her motivation? She thought that since Oprah was the “epicenter” of the self-help and personal-growth movement, she’d put her advice to the test, just to see if it did lead to Okrant’s “best life.”

It wasn’t easy. Okrant says she was “broken down, my tank empty” by October 2008 and thrilled when it was all over. “I got to revel in all my bad habits again,” says Okrant, 37.

Her biggest surprise? “I guess that I actually did get clarity in many areas of my life that I didn’t even know were cloudy,” says the writer, performer and yoga teacher in Chicago.

Okrant recommends three Oprah tips to everyone: Adopt a pet from a shelter (she got a cat), declutter your home, and do hands-on philanthropy. “I now deliver food to a food pantry.” The one tip Okrant could never master, however, was dressing as Oprah says. She says she felt as if she were “pressed into a mold.”

When she began the experiment, she hadn’t planned to write a book but thought she might gather enough stories to put together a one-woman show. But she says she realized she needed closure from the project.

Okrant wrote a daily blog (livingoprah.com) about her experiment. She’s starting a new blog about “facing all my habits head on” (on both robynokrant.com and livingoprah.com) this week.

(Winfrey, who is ending her talk show in 2011, was on break last week and unavailable to comment on the book. Okrant says she has not heard from Oprah’s camp.)

So, does Okrant think she came close to her “best life”?

“I think I eventually found it when I stopped working on it,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was able to rest, a couple of months after the project, that I found myself in my pajamas and very happy. I was at ease in my own skin.”