Oprah Winfrey Shocked by Dad's Tell-all Book

Vernon Winfrey's book about his daughter probably won't appear on Oprah Winfrey's book club list. Winfrey, 74, father to the billionaire media queen, plans to dish about his daughter in a tell-all book.

He's shopping around "Things Unspoken," to various literary agents. The book, not yet in bookstores, describes Winfrey's youth. In the book he reportedly refers to his daughter, who lived with him during her teens as an "out-of-hand and unruly child." There have been a few other unfavorable excerpts from the book floating around on the Internet including:

"She had secrets," he writes. "Dark secrets. Some I didn't discover till she was a grown woman, till it was too late.

What is Oprah's reaction to the book? The 53-year-old told the New York Daily News she wasn't aware of it and was "shocked" she had to hear it about the book from them. She first dismissed the idea when the paper called to get her reaction to her father's plans to write a book.

She told the paper, "I said, 'That's impossible. I can assure them it's not true.'....But then my sister said, 'I think you should call your father.' I called him and it turned out he is writing a book. The worst part of it was him saying, 'I meant to tell you I've been working on it.'"

Oprah, who recently told the Daily News she has a good relationship with her father admitted: "I was upset. I won't say 'devastated,' but I was stunned...The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey. The last person."

She went on to say she would have preferred to know her father was working on the book.

When she was 14, Oprah moved to Nashville to live with her father, who worked as a coal miner and later a barber before becoming a city councilman. She was pregnant at the time and living with her mother in Milwaukee. Her infant son died weeks after birth.

Born into rural poverty Oprah Winfrey went on to become the youngest and first black female news anchor at Nashville's WLAC-TV at the age of 19. She then joined Baltimore's WJZ-TV as a co-anchor and co-host of the station's local talk show People Are Talking. Winfrey relocated to Chicago in 1983 to host WLS-TV's morning talk-show, AM Chicago. As it gained popularity it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. The show is in its 21st season.

Today Winfrey has produced and appeared in a number of films, owns two magazines, O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home, and gives to many charitable causes.