As a transgender woman, I’d gotten this question before. I allowed as how I did.

Ms. Winfrey began to sing to me. “Yes, she has a vagina.”

I interrupted her. “What you mean,” I said, “is, yes, we have no bananas.’”

Everyone screamed. Ms. Winfrey said, “We’ll be right back.”

During that commercial break, as my interviewer was swarmed by her producers and directors, I got my first good look at her. The strange thing was that at such close range, she didn’t look anything like Oprah Winfrey at all.

I’ve been on the program, the last episode of which ran on Wednesday, three times since then. Now whenever I go somewhere to speak about gender issues — whether it’s the National Press Club, Harvard, the Judiciary Committee of the Maine Legislature — I find that there’s one question I’m asked more frequently than any other.

“What is Oprah really like?”

It’s asked by earnest moms in book groups, by excited teenagers, by literary critics who disdainfully claim never to have owned a television. Once, a stoner in a bar asked me that, then said, with considerable melancholy, “Dude, it should totally have been me who got to give everybody a car!”

I never know how to answer. Like a lot of authors, I had some anxiety about going on her program. There was the very likely possibility that I would make a colossal fool of myself. More urgently, I feared that transgender issues would be treated sensationally, as is all too often the case on daytime television.

I needn’t have worried. Ms. Winfrey treated me with respect and that first show made a brief and unlikely best seller out of my tragicomic memoir, “She’s Not There,” about changing genders and keeping my family — my wife and our two sons — together. The day the episode was broadcast, my book went from about No. 300,000 on Amazon to No. 8.

Ms. Winfrey may not have hailed me as the next Tolstoy on that show (plus Tolstoy never had to allow people to film him putting on his pantyhose) but her endorsement helped people see that transgender Americans are human too. One viewer wrote to say, “The strangest thing about you, Jenny, is that, sitting there next to Oprah, you seemed almost like a person somebody could know.”

Not all of my appearances went as well as the first. The last time, the episode was titled “Oprah’s Most Memorable Guests.” They included Ted Haggard and his wife; the husband of the woman who drowned their children; an 800-pound man who’d dieted himself down to 500; a mother with no arms and legs; and a previously recorded segment featuring the Texas polygamist wives. My sons had wanted to be on as well (we Skyped in from our living room) to show that children of transgender people can turn out to be perfectly well adjusted, and as this parade wheeled by, the younger one turned to me and whispered, “I thought you said she liked us?”

What could I tell him, except, “I know. I’m sorry. I thought so too”? (My older son only had questions about the polygamist wives. “If you’re going to have 12 wives, shouldn’t, like,one of them be hot?”)

I was left feeling unsettled. Oprah Winfrey has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, started a school, entertained millions and helped to change the perceptions of gay, lesbian and transgender people in this country from marginal to mainstream. But at least some of her power has come from episodes like the one my sons and I shared with Ted Haggard.

Looking back, though, how could I be anything but grateful for my time as her guest? Last year, a trans woman stopped me as I was walking up Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, and told me that my appearance on the show literally saved her life.

“But can I ask you something, Jenny?” the stranger said, after she’d finished hugging me and wiping away her tears. “What’s Oprah really like?”

What could I say? “She’s nice.”

As a guest, I felt that Ms. Winfrey was a very smart, inscrutable performer. It was only when I watched the show at home, safe in my living room, that I felt again that she was a woman I’d turn to for friendship and advice. She generates a sense of intimacy, to be sure — but you can really appreciate it only from a distance.

After that first show, she paused with me backstage for a photograph. It was the first time all day I’d seen her off camera. “We did good today,” she said, and she put her arm around me.

Later, when the photo was delivered to my house, I looked at the two of us standing there. With all that stage makeup on, I hardly recognized myself. But the woman to my right? That could only have been Oprah Winfrey.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College, is the author, most recently, of “Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor.”

Raise High the P.R. Blitz

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

THE national bereavement over the death of J. D. Salinger provided a strangely public moment in the career of a writer who’d become best known, in recent years, for his reclusiveness. There are other American writers famous for shunning the public eye — Thomas Pynchon leaps to mind — but Mr. Salinger’s seclusion was unique. By the end of his life, he may have become better known for his solitude than for his imagination.

In a way, nothing succeeds like invisibility. In America, we revere artists who won’t do the thing they’re famous for. We revere Glenn Gould, who gave up performing; Greta Garbo, who gave up acting; and Michael Jordan, who not only gave up basketball (at which he was gifted), but then, perversely, took up baseball (at which he was not).

The more steadfastly they refuse us, the more infuriatingly desirable they become, like that boy we just know loves us but who cannot bring himself to call. How can the satirist Tom Lehrer, who long ago gave up performing music for teaching mathematics, not miss writing songs like “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”? (Whenever he’s asked when he will return to his musical career, Mr. Lehrer likes to reply, “Oh, did hell freeze over?”)

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” Mr. Salinger told The Times in 1974. “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy…. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

As a teacher of writing, I frequently hear young authors echo Mr. Salinger’s words, that they’re writing primarily to satisfy themselves. It’s hard to disagree with that on the surface; writing can be great fun. But to create fiction — or nonfiction, for that matter — without any thought of a reader seems creepy to me, the ultimate exercise in self-indulgence.

Of course, we all yearn to live in that kind of self-contained world, now and again. There is plenty to envy about an imaginative universe detached from the world of commerce. Writing just for oneself and one’s own pleasure? Nice work if you can get it.

What I suspect, though, is that fame through invisibility may well belong to a generation that is passing, or passed.

In contemporary America, a writer’s life is more than just the endless, thankless task of writing itself, which E. B. White is said to have called “hard work and bad for the health.” There is also the humiliating, cringe-inducing necessity of becoming a public person, of book tours and radio interviews and, if you’re extremely lucky (as I was), a trip to Oprah’s couch (or in my case, four).

There were a lot of things on my mind when I wrote “She’s Not There,” my memoir of being transgender, during a particularly cold Maine winter, but the green room of the “Today” Show wasn’t one of them. Yet there I was, a year or two later, with the actress Lucy Liu looking over at me and saying: “I have a new movie. What are you on for?”

“Sex change,” I said, and wondered how it was that I had wound up in this situation. Was this what it means now, to be a person of letters? Discussing one’s genitalia with an actress from “Charlie’s Angels”?

When J. D. Salinger disappeared, invisibility was still a perfectly viable — if enigmatic — way to be a successful literary figure in America. But now that the desperate economics of publishing more or less demand that “public relations” become part of a writer’s professional toolkit, being a recluse is a harder stunt to pull off. In order to sustain their careers, plenty of shy, awkward authors — people who chose this profession for the very reason that it’s fundamentally a private activity — have sacrificed their solitude for Web sites, blogs, Twitter accounts and videos of themselves on YouTube. Somehow, these items weren’t on the syllabus in John Barth’s class at Johns Hopkins.

I’ve always thought of encountering readers — of having any readers at all — as an unbelievable gift. Giving lectures, signing books, sitting hopefully behind a table at a bookstore in Wichita Falls: these rituals may be humbling, but I’ve never forgotten the fact that thousands of unpublished writers in this country would give anything to be humiliated in exactly this way. Of all the mortifications to be found in an author’s life, probably none hurts as much as the kind you get from not being able to share your work with another soul.

In “The Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield famously observes, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours.” What was sad and strange about J. D. Salinger is not that he didn’t want to be our terrific friend. It’s that, at the pinnacle of his fame, he yearned for the very thing many writers fear most — a world without readers.

The good news is that we were among “Oprah’s Most Memorable Guests.” The bad news is that the other “memorable’ guests included lying Ted Haggard, the Texas Polygamist Wives, the husband of the woman who drowned her children, a mom with no arms and legs, and a 700 pound man. So, you know. “Memorable” in this instance has a particular meaning.

We’re on about a third of the way into the show, for a single segment, Skyped in from our home. Caveat emptor.