Editorial: Memoir or Make-Believe?

When John Freeman, outgoing president of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), introduced the fiction category at the NBCC awards March 6, he jokingly called it “the truer than true category.” The remark alluded to two stories that had broken only days before about “memoirs” whose authors were forced to ’fess up that the lives they recounted were pure fiction. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but, in a handful of recent cases, autobiographical writing has proven to be truly fictitious. What’s a reviewer, or librarian, to do?

The latest scandals go beyond that of James Frey, who vastly exaggerated his history in A Million Little Pieces (Nan A. Talese: Doubleday) but didn’t have the audacity to claim another’s life. First, Misha Defonseca admitted that Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (Mt. Ivy Pr., 1997) was fictional. It claims to detail her life traveling alone as a small child through war-torn Europe and living in the forest with a pack of wolves. But Misha isn’t Misha at all, nor is she Jewish. While the book was a best seller abroad, it was largely ignored by the media here, perhaps because it was published by a small U.S. press. That may explain why few libraries have it.

Then, Margaret B. Jones, purportedly a white/Native American former foster child and member of the Bloods in South Central L.A., author of the gritty memoir Love and Consequences, was outed as Margaret Seltzer, a Sherman Oaks, CA, valley girl. Seeing a newspaper article about the book along with a photo of Jones, her sister told publisher Riverhead Books (Penguin Group USA) that the memoir was fake. Riverhead recalled the 19,000 copies, offering purchasers a refund.

The book had already received acclaim from many critics, including a starred review in LJ, and was on order by many libraries. “This...exquisitely detailed book is as close to a living experience of the American ghetto as one can get,” wrote our reviewer (LJ 1/08), a sentiment strongly echoed by the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani (2/26/08).

Coming one after the other, the stories of these two nonmemoirs may make us justifiably skeptical about the confessional autobiography. Even Anaheim, CA, public librarian and McSweeney’s contributing writer Scott Douglas (a pseudonym) admits he stretches the truth in his so-called humor memoir Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian (Da Capo) (Xpress Reviews, 3/11/08).

In an afterword, he writes, “The first thing...people ask these days about a memoir is if it’s true.... Of course it is—kind of. Many things…have been exaggerated…to make this book more entertaining for you, dear reader.... If you have a problem with such exaggerations, then I recommend you stay away from the humor section of your local library or bookstore.”

But Douglas is trying to have it both ways, since the book is also being pitched as an authentic depiction of library life. While exaggeration might be justified in humor writing, these false memoirists didn’t merely exaggerate for fun, they created lives they never led for profit and fame.

As reviewers, as librarians, must we vet the truth in every memoir we review or purchase? LJ’s Barbara Hoffert recalls thinking that in her author photo Jones “doesn’t appear 'mixed race,’” as described in the publisher’s catalog, and wonders if she should have followed up in some way. LJ editor Heather McCormack said she felt “manipulated by the story’s out-thereness” but put Love and Consequences on top of her memoir pile for review because it was from a “reputable publisher.”

What of the publishers? Defonseca’s said she couldn’t verify Misha’s story but that her research showed that it could have been true given the dislocations of the era. She also points out, as does Riverhead Books, that author contracts require the author to warrant that the facts are true. Jones’s editor said she never met the author but that Jones presented enough evidence to make her story plausible. Whatever their legal obligations, publishers must take more responsibility for the works they publish—if not full fact-checking then some sampling.

Ultimately, of course, the blame lies with those who choose to lie. James Frey couldn’t sell A Million Little Pieces as fiction, so he presented it as a memoir. And given our cultural predisposition to soul-baring revelations, we made it a best seller.

While we expect some shaping in a memoir—memory is subjective after all—we don’t expect to be totally duped. As much as we want to blame the publishers or even the reviewers, who may need to be more skeptical, the true culprits are the writers themselves.