Fantastical "Memoirs"

In less than a week, two authors have admitted to fabricating memoirs. Margaret B. Jones, a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, confessed Love and Consequences, her memoir of growing up in South Central LA as a foster child raised among drug-running gangbangers is complete fiction. The same is true of Misha Defonseca’s Holocaust memoir, Misha: A Memoire of The Holocaust Years, detailing her horrific childhood living with wild wolves, trekking 1,900 miles across Europe, and killing a German soldier in self-defense.

Before we run out and blame the victims, might over-anxious agents and publishers looking for fantastical “true” stories bear part of the blame? Every writer knows landing an agent is tough, but more and more it seems the stories that make it into print, particularly under the category of “memoir” are beyond belief. From the moment I heard the episodes recounted as true in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, I was suspicious. Not because Northwest Airlines immediately refuted his account of boarding a plane battered and bloody, but because it simply did not ring true. As Stephen King noted in an Entertainment Weekly column later that year, he didn’t buy it either, because King wrote (I’m paraphrasing here) addicts are the best liars the world has ever seen.

Still, agents and publishers gobbled up all three of the stories and apparently without question. And maybe that’s the real problem – knowing that agents and publishers can’t get enough of bizarre “memoirs” (the more outrageous the better) some authors are more than willing to bend their words to tell great fiction they then pass off as “truth”. In the end the public and authors who write legitimate memoirs suffer. Agents and publishers would do the industry as a whole a favor to investigate before they print.