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
Monday, March 03, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
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
I thoroughly enjoyed this entry! And wow, I cannot believe how many people are faking their memoirs. It's kind of tragic.
Post a Comment