What’s the Deal With All the Fakery?
I’d say that pieces of my young life were craptastic enough for a memoir, but probably not craptastic enough for a bestselling memoir. Recently, though, all you need to do to fix that is” embellish” a little. “Embellishing” your published works are all over the news.
- A couple weeks ago I posted about a mother and child who embellished an essay to win Hanna Montana tickets.
- Of course, we all know about the James Frey mess that happened a couple years ago.
- Turns out that Misha Defonseca’s memoir ”Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years” was totally fabricated. You can read about it here, in an article that the Boston Globe appropriately entitled “Den of Lies.”
- …And today’s news of the fake: Penguin-published author Margaret P. Jones admitted that “Love and Consequences” was pretty much made up.
So, what’s with all the fakery?
First of all, the James Frey debacle should have raised some red flags for other memoir-fabricators. Obviously, that’s not the case.
So why all the fake memoirs? Possible reasons, simply off the top of my head here…
- Memoirs are “in,” fiction is much harder to crack.
- Fiction is not as respectable. ?
- Naive new authors don’t know any better.
- This version is much cooler than what really happened.
- Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.
Sidenote: Parts of the book “A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” have been called into question, however the publisher and author stick by this book and no claim has been made that it is totally fabricated.
Such issues are nothing new. In the 90s, Mayan Rigoberta Menchu was accused of falsifying portions of her autobiography.
So, what’s the deal here?
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