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Five reasons why you should not write a fake memoirIt's been a bad week for fake memoirists. The other day, Margaret B. Jones' “memoir” about her troubled youth as a drug runner in South Central L.A., Love and Consequences, was exposed as pure fiction.
It seems that Jones is actually Margaret Seltzer — a privileged, white Valley Girl who never lost foster brothers to gang violence or purchased a burial plot with drug money. Oops. Days earlier, Misha Defonseca's 1997 memoir, Misha: A Mémoire of the Hollocaust Years, was unmasked as a fiction.
Defonseca's story was even more outrageous than Seltzer's tale of urban gang life. She claimed that as a Jewish Belgian child, she traveled 1,900 miles in search of her deported parents. Along the way, she killed a Nazi soldier, ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto and was adopted by a pack of wolves. As it turns out, she did survive the arrest and murder of her parents by Nazis, but she never left Belgium, never killed any soldiers and was never adopted by wolves. Oh, and she's not Jewish. Now, I generally try to avoid giving unsolicited advice, but I'm going to break that rule here: If you're ever inclined to write an inspirational memoir about your life, base it on your actual life. If you'd rather make it all up, call it fiction. I think that's good advice. And here are my reasons why. 1. You will probably get caught. The internet makes it really easy to check facts these days. Remember when James Frey got busted for fabricating and embellishing many of the more dramatic elements of A Million Little Pieces? And Oprah Winfrey and his publisher and everyone who previously supported him were really embarrassed? Well, add two new high-profile fakes to the mix, and editors are probably going to start checking stories a little more carefully. Of course, the fact that the Misha publishers failed to seriously question the “raised by wolves” claim does make me think that perhaps I'm wrong about this. 2. Oprah might yell at you on national television. So far this has only happened to James Frey.
But it had to be really embarrassing. 3. Your siblings will have the opportunity to exact revenge for all the things you did to them as a child. Margaret Seltzer's sister was the one who ratted her out, saying “It could have and should have been stopped before now.” And “I don't know how [the publisher] do[es] business, but I would think that protocol would have them doing fact-checking.” (I would think so, too.) Ouch. So if you're tempted to write the great fake memoir, remember when you refused to let your little sister play Atari. And when you told on your brother after he held you down and spit on you. They might finally have the perfect opportunity to laugh the last laugh. 4. People will write really mean things about you in the reviews section of Amazon.com. You can read the Love and Consequences comments here. And the Misha comments are here. They're not very nice. And it's not fun to read the comments of people who don't like you or your writing. 5. You'll forever be known as “the person who wrote the fake memoir about being raised by wolves.” In all fairness, you'd have to write a memoir about being raised by wolves to get this moniker. (But I imagine you could get a number of other similarly embarrassing titles, many of which would include “liar” and perhaps “pants on fire.”) Now, I honestly don't want to dismiss or disparage Misha Defonseca's clearly traumatic childhood. Violently losing your parents at a young age must be horrifying, and I can appreciate that a child would construct a heroic fantasy life to deal with the trauma. But publishing a memoir that claims you were raised by wolves? That is, perhaps, taking things a bit too far. So, when you sit down to write your memoir, unless you actually were raised by wolves, you might want to stick to the more boring, but true, stories that probably won't actually get you a book deal. Submitted by on March 5, 2008 - 6:42pm. |
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News, Reviews & Commentary on Lesbian and Bisexual women in Entertainment and the Media
I don't get it...
Why not write fiction? This makes NO sense to me.
BTW: Remind me to tell you about the 18 years I spent on a deserted island in the Bermuda triangle...fascinating! :D
Is that you, Wonder Woman?
Personally, I don't give a damn about some druggy's life and details of all the shit he's been through.
I don't see a problem...
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the article, just offering another perspective.
All autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs are in some sense fiction anyway. The author selects what to include and what not to include; so when we read these narratives, we should enter them with that in mind. Labeling a text as "memoir" conjurs a series of assumptions, but as readers, should we not always question what we are reading? That old "take everything with a grain of salt" adage comes to mind. I know the assumption exists that what we read in these particular works is "true" or "fact," but those concepts are always already complex and skewed based on individual experiences and subjectivities. In other words, with regards to narrative, the binary of true/false is inherently problematic.
Just my little opinion....
Patient: There's like this longing ... this pull. I mean, does that make me, you know, like, some kind of...?
Maeby: Homosexual.
Tobias: Maeby, please. She's right, though, you probably are a homosexual.Well ....
I was not only mauled by a bear, but I knew Captain Kidd. Oh yeah, THE Captain Kidd. The only reason I'm alive today is because of the fountain of youth. That I found. With Captain Kidd. And a really angry bear.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always our self we find in the sea
ha! aha! ahahaha!!
ha! aha! ahahaha!!
mauled by a bear?
pirategrrrl, i'll buy your memoir if you'll buy mine.
you got it, Shell!
Although if I've been mauled by a bear, you must have been diving with Sharks, right? And I bet you know Moby Dick personally?
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always our self we find in the sea
Sick of the memoir
hear, hear!
It's too bad authors for some reason feel compelled to fake memoirs rather than writing what would seem like very compelling fiction.
omg, inbd
Sad...
They may be mentally unbalanced.
L Word voodoo
In season 3 the publishers (S&S) persuaded Jenny Schecter to 'rebrand' her work as a memoir. If the publishing houses reckon that marketing a book as a memoir - as opposed to straight up fiction, is the way to go, they must have solid financial reasons for doing so. It's indicative of the current cultural climate where the entertained public lap anything up that has a whiff of 'reality' about it.
I don't understand when or how imagination became so uncool.
Don't blame the author blame the corporation.
JT LeRoy...
Remember that guy, a supposedly extremely deprived and sexually abused child who turned to drugs and prostitution after being abandoded by his mother and ultra-evangelical siblings, who turned out to be a well off girl? Well "LeRoy" didn't write bad books (I especially appreciated "Sarah"), but it really bugs me that this girl had to invent and pose as a whole persona in order to promote her work... It's really pathetic not to support your stuff as your own and mask a work of fiction as fake memoir. What's the point? Give it more edge? I don't get it. I remeber that the whole thing embarassed a lot of folk from tha art world (both literatutre and cinema) who endorsed "LeRoy" and his work.
Little Red Riding Hood: A Memoir
Francine Saint Marie
I met a wolf once...
...
... while walking through a verdant glen, bathed in dappled sunlight. Though I was small (and delicious) my mead addicted birth mother forced me to carry heavy, laden crudely made baskets full of government cheese and stale bread to my elderly, but-oh-so-wise grandmama. I was forced to do this on a regular basis so that Mom could have her "adult time" with my seven uncles: Creepy, Nasty, Filthy, Wormy and the triplets - Pervy, Peda and Phile.
Only now have the memories of that encounter with the wolf resurfaced, thanks to a
gignormous advancegift of a wonderful marriage to a wonderful man and the seven wonderful children we have created throughIVF and tequilaprayer.There's fake, then there's fake
It's really easy to back
It's really easy to back ground fact checks these days thanks to tools like the internet I don't understand why this people think that they can get away with these lies? Still these type of books arn't my cup of tea so whatever.
-Nathiest
live for lust die for love
Factchecking=$
The reason the publishers don't factcheck is financial, of course. (isn't everything.) even if you pay some grunt edit assistant $20/hr, multiply that by 600 books per imprint and...well, you can do the math. the pub indistry is in the crapper anyway, they don't have the resources to allocate. also they trust that the author is telling the truth, and if that 's not the case, the author is an independent contractor, so the pub house is not on the hook legally if something goes wrong usually. there's a reason that sneaky food cook is suing jessica seinfeld and not whoever published the book. so that's the simple answer. money. even if you use the internet as you suggest, someone still has to do it.
all that being said, when you're an editor and you read that a person was adopted by wolves and think "that's crazy! how?" or any one of the claims james frey made, maybe you should pick up a phone? that's what happend at the NYT w/ the sister of the "drug runner"--no one at the pub bothered to make one call. but it's not likely to change unless it costs them more money to recall books than it does to factcheck. and they might be turning a corner on that.
independent fact checker
independent fact checker for publishing companys.... Thats a good idea. $$$
-Nathiest
live for lust die for love
love and consequences?
should be "truth or consequences"
when i ready frey's book, THEN found out it was a fake...i wanted my money back—immediately. hey folks, if we can return faulty "products"...why not faulty literature.
Hoax
I think this is much more than a lie, i think it is a hoax. I find her assumed accent particularly offfensive.
Decide for yourself: Here is a half-hour interview with her from NPR, from before she was caught. (Not the one at the top, the one a few inches down along the side). The interview starts for real a little over 5 minutes in.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87882228
On a personal note, as someone who has dealt with pathological liars who are convinced of their story's truth, I hope she gets the help she needs. That's a sad and lonely life.
~~~~
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. ~ Rita Mae Brown
shattered dreams
Well there go my fantasies of writing that memior of how I sailed to a foreign county under antarctica :P
In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher. - Dalai Lama
I wanted to know what the whole Caboodle was... and then I found it...
http://www.caboodleforums.com/
a thin line sometimes....
It's one thing to stretch the truth of your past for your memoir, or to sort of, kind of, maybe remember it differently then it was (shades of gray). However, I think you either tell it as close to the real thing as you can recall, or you manipulate it into fiction.
But then again, occasionally even when you try and tell folks the truth, they just may find it too hard to accept. I wasn't raised by wolves, LOL, but I doubt anyone would believe certain parts of my past if I tried to write a tell-all-memoir. So you might as well stick to fiction -- because fiction is often not as strange as reality and is not as limited.