Not So True Life Stories
March 10, 2008
Fake Memoirs are all over the news lately. The most recent memoir to be exposed as fiction is Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones, which has now been recalled by the publisher
. In this memoir, which got glowing reviews (including a starred Library Journal review), Jones claims to be half-Native American and raised by a foster family in L.A. gangland. In truth, she’s white and was raised quite comfortably in a upper middle-class home.
Scott Simon discussed fake memoirs (like Jones and James Frey) on NPR’s Morning Edition this weekend and made a great point about why Jones and Frey would write fictional stories and claim them as memoir: writers get a break when they’re telling their own stories; that is, life is hard, but fiction is harder.
For discussion: What’s your favorite memoir – true or fake? (CLJ)
Entry Filed under: book chat. Tags: memoirs, nonfiction.
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1.
Therese | April 9, 2008 at 9:34 am
Mine, at the moment, is Marley & Me, which always make my dogs seem so well behaved. Surprised that a dog owner’s memoir was a bestseller? It makes sense, since there are more households with dogs in the US than households with children under the age of 18.
2.
Bill Michel | April 10, 2008 at 9:18 pm
I wonder if people complained about Mark Twain’s memoirs. They are at least as fictional as any of the current controversial ones. I mean, come on, did he really see 15 skulls of Adam while in Europe, as he reports in “The innocents abroad”?And is Capote’s “Christmas memory” entirely factual? More to come…
3.
Judy | April 11, 2008 at 12:01 pm
I don’t want to sound like a complete politial junkie, but I read Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father long before Obama ran for anything. I was fascinated and moved by it. I even pushed it on my kid, when Teddy was in his most obnoxious “wannabee bro’ from the ‘hood” phase. (A phase happily now concluded, although Teddy has become an Obama supporter.)
4.
Anna | April 13, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I loved The Liars Club by Mary Carr. I guess she went to Macalester.
5.
Carol J. | April 14, 2008 at 10:12 am
My favorite memoir right now is also my favorite Sure Bet: The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. This memoir tells of Walls’s unbelievably harsh childhood, but her matter-of-fact delivery keeps it from getting too sentimental or maudlin and makes it impossible to put down.
6.
Bill | April 20, 2008 at 5:01 pm
As John Irving writes in Trying to save Piggy Sneed, “please understand that (to any writer with a good imagination) all memoirs are fiction. A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened; the most truthful detail is what “could” have happened, or what “should” have.”