Books: The era of the fake memoir

I guess publishing has always been a trend-driven industry, said Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune, but the sudden boom in fake memoirs is a phenomenon that’s hard to fathom. Last week, it was Love and Consequences, a harrowing memoir of Los Angeles gang life that turns out to have been written by a middle-class white woman from the leafy suburb of Sherman Oaks. The week before, it was Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, whose author was forced to admit that no, she hadn’t run into the woods to escape the Nazis, nor had she been reared there by a family of wolves. In fact, she’s not even Jewish. And all this, of course, comes only two years after the public shaming of James Frey for having invented parts of his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces. What makes this trend so baffling is that in this Google-powered age, “when the Internet has made fact-checking into a sporting event,” these hoaxers are almost certain to be exposed. “So why do they do it?”

It’s obvious, said Steve Almond in The Boston Globe. These kinds of gripping confessionals are what people are buying. A generation ago, most writers with talent and something to say about the world delivered their messages in the form of novels. But then came the Internet, the cable news networks, and the “perpetual news cycle.” The public grew accustomed, and eventually addicted, to a steady diet of real-life drama, from car chases and sex scandals to mall shootings and missing teenagers, next to which the expertly crafted falsehoods of fiction seemed dull and irrelevant. And so, in their desperation to sell books, authors and publishers started selling us their own version of the lurid, “real-life” tales of horror and hope that we were watching on television. “Authenticity” is what Americans are clamoring for at the moment, said Ruben Martinez in the Los Angeles Times. The irony, of course, “is that the more we insist on the ‘real,’ the more elusive it becomes.”

That’s no small matter, said Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Times. The authors of these fake memoirs are guilty of something “far more reprehensible” than deceiving their readers. In claiming that their “personal reality” is just as valid as the world around them, they cheapen and trivialize “the real traumas suffered by real people.” When we’re inundated by fake stories about the Holocaust and inner-city misery, about suffering and heroism, it will “inevitably make us distrustful of the true ones.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up