Monday, March 03, 2008

Come back James Frey, all is forgiven

It's getting to the point where memoirs should be assumed to be fake.
"In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.
The problem is that none of it is true.
Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family."

"A Belgian writer has admitted her bestselling memoir about how she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods to escape from the Nazis during the Second World War was fabricated.
Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years (also known as Survivre avec les Loups) by Misha Defonseca was translated into 18 languages during the 1990s and made into a feature film in France."

To restore a little balance to this sad joke of a genre, rapper Eminem's new memoir promises to be "every bit as raw and uncensored as the man himself," according to his publisher.

You can't make this stuff up.

Posted by Dave

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ouch David! Maybe now would be a good time to point your readers to our new Life Writing blog where we hope to discuss all things auto/biography and memoir. It is accessible from our website at www.wlupress.wlu.ca

thanks!
Clare

Chanda @ Disordered Cosmos said...

I thoroughly enjoyed this entry! And wow, I cannot believe how many people are faking their memoirs. It's kind of tragic.

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