The memoir of a liar has become a new genre. What is unfortunate, other than the liars among us, is the fact that "a memoir" sells better than a novel; each of these "lies" could have been presented as fiction and been just as gripping to anyone not stuck in the prison of literal thinking. It was the dream of Zola and other "naturalists" that fiction could be a sort of test tube in which human behavior was tested and evaluated; that, in fact, we could learn from this. Fiction could modify human behavior because we'd become sensitive to the consequences of action. This didn't happen in any broad social sense. "Based on a true story" is a commercial advantage only in a culture in which the imagination has been relegated to an instrument of trivial fancies.
Author of Hoax Book Created Elaborate Backstory
The publishers of a critically acclaimed memoir about a girl raised by a black foster family who ran drugs for a notorious Los Angeles street gang pulled the book after revelations that the story was an elaborate fabrication.
The book, "Love and Consequences," was recalled just a week after it hit stores, when it emerged that the author, Margaret B. Jones, had lied about her name and every detail of her life.
Jones was a pseudonym used by Margaret Seltzer, 33, of Eugene, Ore., who lied about being half-Native American and having been raised in south-central Los Angeles by a black foster mother she called "Big Mom." She also claimed to have run drugs for the Bloods street gang and that one of her foster brothers was killed by rival Crips gang members.
Seltzer's memoir is the second book of non-fiction in as many weeks to be revealed as a hoax and the latest in an increasingly lengthy list of biographies found to be false.
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2 comments:
http://gawker.com/5003501/fabricating-writers-hilarious-interview
"Q: You were 16 when you cooked your first batch of rock cocaine. What led you to do that?
A: Our water had been shut off because Big Mom couldn’t pay the bill."
It's some form a voyeurism in the readers. People tend to read stuff that is supposed be real. About someone's life.
Last year I took an "Advanced fiction workshop" at the new school. More than half of the people who attended there were writing their memoirs. I understand fiction and memoir may employ the same writing technique but memoir is not supposed to be fiction. I was at a complete loss when some of their works had banal characters and I couldn't say "Make this character do this".
I have nothing against memoirs. It's just that I prefer reading adn writing fiction.
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