Jan 18 2009
Fake Memoirs - Why Do They Do It?
A couple of weeks ago, I saw the headline for an article, Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir of love is exposed as a hoax. Worried, I clicked on the link. I have read some Holocaust memoirs, and I didn’t like the idea of being duped.
Well, in this case, I was fine - Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived wasn’t scheduled to be released until next month. I hadn’t been hoodwinked after all.
Except, I have been before. I read another biography called Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, and it was only afterwards, as I did a couple of searches on Google, that I found out that much of the book was made up. I was not impressed.
One of the latest cases of fake memoirs comes from Margaret B Jones (her real name was Margaret Seltzer, btw) who wrote a memoir that had absolutely nothing to do with reality. At least Angel at the Fence and Bringing Down the House had some vague resemblance to the real world.
Entitled Love and Consequences, it was supposedly about Margaret being a drug runner for the Bloods in LA, growing up as a foster child in the LA system, blah blah blah. Not a word of it was true. She was caught when her sister saw her picture for an interview done with the New York Times, and called in to tell them that it was all a lie.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at their next family reunion.
And don’t even get me started on that Frey dude. I think we’ve all heard enough about him to last us a lifetime. Poor Oprah - she said that the Angel at the Fence story was “the single greatest love story…we’ve ever told on air.” That, coupled with her initial backing and enthusiasm for James Frey, makes me think that she’s going to be a lot more choosy about which guests she has on the air from now on.
So comes the inevitable question: Why? Why would authors take the chance at being revealed as fakes before the world, when they could write the story either as it really did happen (now there’s a novel idea!) or write it as fiction? To me, the chance of discovery is just too great.
Do you really think you can go on a national book tour, have your book made into a movie, etc, and never have anyone catch on? What, are all of your childhood friends living in caves, where they wouldn’t see the coverage on your triumphant book tour? (And I am assuming here that if someone has the balls to completely fabricate a story and get it published as truth, that they’d also dream that the book would be a smashing success. What would the point be if no one cared about the memoir after all?)
Here’s my armchair analysis: These people are whacked. They have some inner need to be recognized beyond what their life would naturally give to them, and the only way to get that recognition that they crave is to make up a life much more exciting than the one they really lived through.
In yesterday’s review of Identical Strangers, I said that the book was not an interesting read, and in the comment section, Hindleyite jokingly suggested that they should have taken “creative license” with their story to make it more interesting. Perhaps that’s what these fake memoir authors were afraid of: That if they didn’t “spice things up” that no one would care enough to read.
The bottom line though, is that fake memoirs give a bad reputation to the whole industry. It is hard to trust what you read, when there have been so many bad apples passed off as truth.
By the way, Love and Consequences was published by the same publishing house as A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. They don’t have a real stellar track record here. (I bet Oprah is counting her lucky stars she didn’t invite Margaret Jones onto her show too. How much bad luck can one talk show host have?) Perhaps this publishing house and Oprah can join forces and hire an investigative team in an attempt to not get mud smeared all over their faces again.
So, to all of my easy chair psychologists reading this: Why do you think the authors of the fake memoirs do what they do? Recognition? Money? To see if they can get away with it? Because they’re flat-out nuts? Tell me what you think below.
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Interesting post, Hava.
I was just talking about this with a friend last week and I actually wish that I had read “A Million Little Pieces” or one of those other stories before the truth came out, because now I have no interest in reading them and I hear they’re pretty good stories.
As for why people do it–I have no idea. Maybe they think no one will care if they write the “real stuff” (and sometimes they’re right) or maybe they think that if they pass it off as the truth, more people will read it than if it’s clearly fiction.
I think part of it is an overwhelming need to get into the spotlight. In other cases, I’ve seen a number of “memoirs” produced of OTHER PEOPLE that even a cursory read with a skeptical mind would discount as nonsense that only hasn’t been sued because the individuals involved are dead. Unfortunately, those haven’t been scotched as thoroughly and still remain, sensationalist garbage to amuse the dull-witted.
I’m a very skeptical reader and have a good instinct for, if you’ll excuse the expression, BS. I think the fascination with celebrities (as opposed to those with notable merit) is very tempting for the shallow to not only make money from but also garner recognition which, oddly enough, could be merited by simply changing the classification to fiction and not pretending an association with reality.
So, no, I don’t get it either.
I think it’s because the dividing line between fiction and memoir is always fuzzy, and instead of struggling with this fuzziness, they just give in to it. Nobody can remember every detail and every conversation that has happened in their lives (well, except for Jill Price, author of The Woman Who Can’t Forget), so even a good memoirist is just giving an educated guess based on good research and conversations with other people who remember the incidents. Anyone who writes dialogue in a memoir is fudging the truth a tiny bit, unless someone recorded the conversations. These tiny fudges make larger lies tempting to some people, especially if money, fame or a first big break are on the line.