Nonfiction Book Reviews

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.

I picked up Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein because the title caught my eye. Identical strangers? Wow - talk about a mind-bending idea!  How would it be to have a twin somewhere in the world but never know it growing up, and only finding out the truth as an adult? And when those twins first find out the truth, how do they deal with it?  And (question of the century!) why on earth would the twins be separated in the first place?

As you can tell, I was quite intrigued by the premise of the story, and I started reading it with high interest.  It was a lot like my reasoning behind picking up Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor: There’s really not that many people out there who have this kind of thing happen to them in real life.  It was a plot worthy of a Hollywood movie.

I’m sad to say my interest soon waned, and I ended the book feeling “ehh” about it.  Yes, you heard me - ehh.  It’s the technical term for “so-so/blah/or otherwise not inspired.”  Now you know.

First, a bit of background on what happened:

Elyse and Paula were identical twins born to a mental health patient who was not married and could not take care of her children. She gave the children up for adoption, but unbeknownst to her, the Jewish adoption agency, Louise Wise Services, had agreed to be part of a scientific study being conducted on twins.

The scientists had a goal in mind: They wanted to settle, once and for all, the debate between nature and nurture.  They decided that if they took identical twins and split them at birth, then they could watch them grow up and see how they turn out.  Would they still be similar, despite the different environments?  Or would they be molded by their families and show that nurture really does triumph over nature?

The book goes through chronologically, starting with how Elyse first found out that she had a twin sister, to contacting Paula, to meeting each other for the first time, and on to developing a relationship with each other.  The book switches back and forth between the two, first one talking exclusively in first person and relating an event, and then switching to the other twin who was also talking in first person and (usually) relating the same event you just finished reading about.

This style of writing allows you to “see” inside of each person’s head which gave me a feeling of immediacy, as if I was really living through all of this.  Unfortunately, with the repeating of information again and again, it got to be boring and repetitious.  (In reality, life is boring enough the first time around - almost no one except apparently Britney Spears has an interesting enough life that it bears being repeated again and again.  Paula and Elyse are not exceptions to this rule.)

Also, they spent much of the book upset about being a part of the study done, and working to uncover what the study was for, who was doing it, etc.  Although I understood their need to know this information, it honestly wasn’t that interesting to me.  Just because I knew they cared didn’t mean that I did.

Along with trying to find out information about the study, Elyse and Paula also spent much of their time looking for their mother.  That is what actually got me to the end of the book - would they find her?  Would she welcome them into her life, or say ‘No way, you’re part of my past’?  I won’t ruin the ending for anyone who picks the book up, so I won’t say what happens there, but I will say that that question was really the only thing that kept me reading.

It was a very honest and real book - the twins spend quite a bit of time talking about each other and their innermost thoughts that most people wouldn’t tell the world.  They didn’t always get along after they met, and they are genuine enough in the telling of their story to repeat all that happened.  I give them kudos for being truthful in their memoir.

But in the end, I guess I just felt like it was a book that could have been helped with some editing work.  I didn’t need to hear the same conversation repeated, this time just from another point of view.  Also, I had a hard time keeping the twins straight in the beginning (now which was which?) and so when the story would jump from one head to the other, sometimes it just plain lost me all together.

I think this would be an especially interesting read for anyone who was adopted, or was a twin (or, even better, both).
If you are a gigantic fan of memoirs everywhere, then you’d probably want to pick this one up, if only for the unique idea behind it.  But for the rest of the world, I’d probably recommend to just skip Identical Strangers.

Although there was plenty of interesting information in it (like some of the stories they dug up about other twins who had been separated and reunited - there are some doozies out there!) there was just enough uninteresting information and repeated “stuff” to make me yawn one too many times.

I give Identical Strangers 3.75 out of 5 stars.

Hava

PS If you are interested in memoirs about adoption, make sure to check out my review of China Ghosts by Jeff Gammage.  That is a beautifully told story of international adoption, and its impact on a family.

When I first read Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich, I wasn’t overly impressed by it, but rather pegged it as a mindless read, good for a summer afternoon at the beach.  It was more of an escapism book than you’d normally find in the nonfiction section, that’s for sure.

I had picked it up because I saw advertisements for the movie 21 (it’s based on the book) and figured it’d be fun to read.  What was surprising to me (although it shouldn’t have been, looking back on it) was the fact that the book is mostly fiction.

First, the plot: Basically, Ben Mezrich meets a guy at a party (Kevin Lewis) who says he has an amazing story to tell, and he wants Ben to tell it in a book.  Ben gets this kind of thing all the time as a writer so he really didn’t expect much, but to humor him, he agreed to listen.

Kevin told him a story that would be unbelievable to the average person: He was recruited as an MIT student, to learn how to count cards and play blackjack.  He was then sent to Las Vegas and other gambling cities to win the backers (the ones supplying the bankroll) the big bucks.  He got a cut of what he made, and became very rich because of this lifestyle.

All of that is actually true.  What’s not true is the embellishments that Ben Mezrich added to make the book more “readable,” as he put it.  In an interview with the Boston Globe, Mezrich said, “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable.”  He also said, “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”

That really, no really bugged me.  I read a nonfiction book, expecting it to be *ahem* nonfiction.  I know, a real shocker there.  There was a laundry list of items that were completely made up (click on the link to the interview above if you’re interested) and then a whole other list of items that were exaggerated, changed, and warped in order for the book to be more “readable.”

Ben Mezrich did manage to achieve his goal of being more readable - his book became a New York Times bestseller.  I don’t like the methods used to achieve that goal though. I’ve never been a fan of the saying, “The ends justify the means,” and this was no exception.

I give Bringing Down the House 1.5 out of 5 stars, and I’m putting Ben Mezrich on my blacklist of authors.  I will never pick up one of his books again.  If you’re wanting some real information on Las Vegas, make sure to head on over to my friend’s blog, Living in Las Vegas.  It’s guaranteed 100% nonfiction.

Hava