The story is so familiar that it has become a cliché: a memoir is published to great critical acclaim one week followed by revelations of fantastical lies and misrepresentations. Recent weeks have been considerably cruel to groups whose stories have been appropriated by poseurs.
Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca, was published in 1997 and revealed as a fake last week, though questions of its authenticity have persisted for years. The author's undoing came now because her book was made into a film in France that premiered in January.
Today comes the news that a new memoir, Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival about the life of a young girl growing up as a foster kid in South Central Los Angeles, is also untrue. The New York Times had reviewed it with great gusto, did a feature on the author and even printed the first chapter of the memoir. The newspaper's website had a slide show accompanying the feature story.
The author of this latest fabula-vérité, Margaret Jones (nee Margaret Seltzer) who wrote in great detail about the life on the mean streets of the city, grew up in the affluent suburb of Sherman Oaks and was undone by her older sister according to published reports.
The book has been recalled and is certain to set off rounds of lawsuits. As of this morning, the author's website and MySpace page were still functioning, but they'll either languish unchanged or be removed as the fervor over the foisting of fiction as fact foments.
The interesting thing about both stories is that there are compelling tales behind the lies. Ms. Selzer is in fact an activist working to end gang violence. The parents of Ms. DeFonseca (nee Monique De Wael) were members of the Belgian underground during World War II and were executed by the Nazis. But those stories weren't the ones they chose to tell, instead creating fantastical biographies of children who never were.
Blake Eskin of Slate rightly calls the appropriation of the stories of Holocaust victims an "affront," but Mr. Eskin's outrage could easily be extended to the appropriation of stories of gang life in Los Angeles.
The authors of both of these fictions have justified their appropriations. Ms. De Wael has portrayed herself as a victim of Nazi atrocities who concocted this story as a survival mechanism. Ms. Seltzer said that she "felt there was good that [she] could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."
Neither defense holds up to scrutiny. Ms. De Wael first told her story to a synagogue full of people memorializing the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Ms. Seltzer claims to have graduated the University of Oregon, which she did not. Both women are storytellers with all of the attendant meaning of the term.
The belief is that publishers and editors embrace these stories not because they are well-told or well-written but because they are believed to be true. Readers think, "Isn't the fictional story of a girl walking across Europe with the aid of kindly wolves during the horror of the Second World War compelling enough to find a place in the catalog? Isn't the story of a young outsider thrust into the middle of a virtual war zone interesting enough to gain an audience?"
The authors play on the desire of people for truth. As a storyteller myself, I am often asked by readers if something I've clearly marked as fiction is true. People will listen to fantastic stories at cocktail parties and never once call someone on an obvious fabrication.
It all reminds me of the bunkhouse scene in the 1972 film "The Cowboys" starring John Wayne and Roscoe Lee Browne.
Mr. Browne's character, Jebediah Nightlinger, is the cook hired by Wil Andersen (Mr. Wayne's character) for an upcoming cattle drive whose cowhands are all school boys. Mr. Nightlinger has just entered the bunkhouse, which "smells of boy."
The dozen or so boys are curious about him, but—after several quite impertinent and quite personal questions—declare that he's just like them.
Mr. Nightlinger laughs and proclaims that his father was a "brawny Moor" who was "six feet six inches tall" with his head "bound in a red velvet cloth." The father captured a woman, "ripe and dark" and carried her off into the night.
"They came to a castle, he knocked down the door with stump of an oak tree, and he killed everyone inside just so they'd have a place to rest. Later, while she slept, he walked the parapets and he became a king," he says.
"Is that true," the youngest of the boys asks.
"If it isn't, it ought to be," Nightlinger says.
Writers—especially unscrupulous ones who declare themselves memoirists—will always benefit from the little boy in all of us who is desperate to believe that it is true.
