LOS ANGELES, Dec 30: Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul who revolutionized daytime television, has often been offered opportunities to write a memoir but has never followed through. Speaking candidly with Gayle King at the Massachusetts Conference for Women in Boston on December 12, Winfrey shared why she never completed the project.

"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," Winfrey explained. "For a long time, I didn’t do it because my mother was living. I'd started a memoir, and Stedman [Graham, her long-time 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.'"

Winfrey further revealed that after she became the famous "Oprah with a capital O," her mother’s perspective on their past changed. "She had a revisionist idea of history. She said, 'We didn’t have much, but we sure had love,'" Winfrey recalled, making a face that conveyed her disagreement. "So I haven’t written a memoir."

When asked if she would finally consider writing her memoir now that her mother passed away in 2018, Winfrey was firm in her response. "I’m not even thinking about it," she said.

Winfrey reflected on her decision to end The Oprah Winfrey Show after 25 seasons in May 2011. When King asked if Winfrey ever regretted not continuing with the show on a daily basis, Winfrey made it clear that she had no desire to return to that grind, even if it would have been financially rewarding. "No. Daily? No," she said, explaining that ending the show was the right choice. "If I had signed another contract, I would have made, minimum, another billion dollars doing that."

Winfrey recalled how, after sending her entire 300-person audience on a trip to Australia in 2010, the show began to feel like an unending cycle of topping previous surprises. "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," she said. "Every year, we were trying to outdo ourselves, and I knew we were in trouble. We literally had taken the entire audience to Australia. 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 Winfrey no longer has the rigorous schedule that her talk show demanded, she is enjoying her newfound flexibility. She has launched a new podcast, The Oprah Podcast, where she engages in conversations with notable individuals. Winfrey also shared her plans to try cross-country skiing, further embracing her free-spirited approach to life.

"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."