Recently there have been a rash of published memoirs that have turned out to be fake, that is, works of fiction. Below are a couple of news reports about some recent examples. My question: What is your reaction to this? Is penning a fictional memoir just another genre, an opportunity to create a gripping fictional character in a realistic environment to entertain readers--or is it akin to perpetrating a hoax on society and should be condemned? Furthermore, so you think that the public uproar from these examples is a new phenomenon--that is, that there are different standards than fity or a hundred or more years ago--or has there just been an "unwritten rule" against such behavior that has just now been started to be broken? Is this just good sense, good manners, and appropriate behavior--or will it have a long-term effect on future literary endeavors? <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Memoir of gangbanging, drug dealing is fake NEW YORK (AP) -- A memoir by a white woman who claimed she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for a gang in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood has turned out to be pure fiction, a newspaper report says. "Love and Consequences" received good reviews, one of which noted its "novelist's eye." In "Love and Consequences," published last week by Penguin Group USA imprint Riverhead Books, author Margaret B. Jones writes about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American girl in South-Central Los Angeles in the foster home of Big Mom. One of her foster brothers, she writes, was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home. Jones also writes of carrying illegal guns and selling drugs for the Bloods gang. Jones' story came apart after her older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw an article in The New York Times about the author and contacted Riverhead, the Times says. Hoffman questioned the publisher's fact-checking and said the fabrication should and could have been prevented, the Times reported on its Web site Monday. The publisher has recalled all copies of the book and has canceled Jones' book tour, which was to begin on Monday. Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is white and grew up in a well-off area of San Fernando Valley in California with her biological family, the Times says. She attended a private Episcopal day school and never lived with a foster family or sold drugs for a gang. Jones, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, also lied about having graduated from the University of Oregon. Jones, 33, admitted to the Times that her memoir was fully fabricated. Many of the experiences recounted in the book, she told the newspaper, were based on the experiences of friends she had met while doing anti-gang outreach in Los Angeles. "For whatever reason, I was really torn, and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don't listen to," she told the paper. An editor at Riverhead, in an interview with the Times, described the discovery as "upsetting" and as a "huge personal and professional betrayal." The editor, Sarah McGrath, said she had numerous conversations with the writer about telling the truth. "I've been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years, and her story never has changed," McGrath told the Times. "All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks." Jones didn't immediately return a telephone message left by The Associated Press at her home on Monday.</div> <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Writer admits Holocaust book is not true By MELISSA TRUJILLO, Associated Press Writer Fri Feb 29, 5:12 PM ET BOSTON - Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true. She didn't live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn't trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She's not even Jewish. Defonseca, a Belgian writer now living in Massachusetts, admitted through her lawyers this week that her best-selling book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was an elaborate fantasy she kept repeating, even as the book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France. "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving," Defonseca said in a statement given by her lawyers to The Associated Press. "I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost," the statement said. Defonseca, 71, has an unlisted number in Dudley, about 50 miles southwest of Boston. Her husband, Maurice, told The Boston Globe on Thursday that she would not comment. Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her. Her two Brussels-based lawyers said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical. In the statement, Defonseca said she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents. Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters. The statement said her parents were arrested when she was 4 and she was taken care of by her grandfather and uncle. She said she was poorly treated by her adopted family, called a "daughter of a traitor" because of her parents' role in the resistance, which she said led her to "feel Jewish." She said there were moments when she "found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination." Pressure on the author to defend the accuracy of her book had grown in recent weeks, after the release of evidence found by Sharon Sergeant, a genealogical researcher in Waltham. Sergeant said she found clues in the unpublished U.S. version of the book, including Defonseca's maiden name "De Wael" — which was changed in the French version — and photos. After a few months of research, she found Defonseca's Belgian baptismal certificate and school record, as well as information that showed her parents were members of the Belgian resistance. "Each piece was plausible, but the difficulty was when you put it all together," Sergeant said. Others also had doubts. "I'm not an expert on relations between humans and wolves, but I am a specialist of the persecution of Jews, and they (Defonseca's family) can't be found in the archives," Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg told RTL television. "The De Wael family is not Jewish nor were they registered as Jewish." Defonseca's attorneys, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, contacted the author last weekend to show her evidence published in the Belgian daily Le Soir, which also questioned her story. "We gave her this information and it was very difficult. She was confronted with a reality that is different from what she has been living for 70 years," Nathalie Uyttendaele said. Defonseca's admission is just the latest controversy surrounding her 1997 book, which also spawned a multimillion dollar legal battle between the woman, her co-author and the book's U.S. publisher. Defonseca had been asked to write the book by publisher Jane Daniel in the 1990s, after Daniel heard the writer tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue. Daniel and Defonseca fell out over profits received from the best-selling book, which led to a lawsuit. In 2005, a Boston court ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer Vera Lee $22.5 million. Defonseca's lawyers said Daniel has not yet paid the court-ordered sum. Daniel said Friday she felt vindicated by Defonseca's admission and would try to get the judgment overturned. She said she could not fully research Defonseca's story before it was published because the woman claimed she did not know her parents' names, her birthday or where she was born. "There was nothing to go on to research," she said. Lee, of Newton, muttered "Oh my God" when told Defonseca made up her childhood and was not Jewish. She said she always believed the stories the woman told her as they prepared to write the book, and no research she did gave her a reason not to. "She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case," Lee said. "I was just totally bowled over by the news."</div>
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>She's not even Jewish.</div> C'mon who's lying about that. Whenever anyone says they're Jewish, I usually assume they're not telling the truth.
It would be an interesting genre if they were properly labeled as fiction. That really is the only line I care about.
who reads something and believes it anyways? I don't think I've ever believed something just by reading it.
What's the big difference between living a lie and putting it down in words? The public eats up the fake personas that most entertainers and celebrities put on, but somehow can't stomach people writing books about the same thing. Obviously I don't think its particularly honourable, but I don't see why there has to be such over-the-top uproar about this stuff.
I spent my childhood thinking there was a man named Simon Morgenstern. Could Bill Goldman have gotten away with "A Princess Bride" and "The Silent Gondoliers"--which are attributed to Morgenstern and include "autobiographical" snippets from his "life"--today?
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (shookem @ Mar 4 2008, 11:34 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>She's not even Jewish.</div> C'mon who's lying about that. Whenever anyone says they're Jewish, I usually assume they're not telling the truth. </div> I sincerely hope you're kidding.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Dumpy @ Mar 5 2008, 11:31 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (shookem @ Mar 4 2008, 11:34 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>She's not even Jewish.</div> C'mon who's lying about that. Whenever anyone says they're Jewish, I usually assume they're not telling the truth. </div> I sincerely hope you're kidding. </div> c'mon have i ever made a serious non-sports post in the five years i've been around bbb/s2? i sincerely hope you develope a personality.
