Don't Feed the Liars!: On Fraudulent Memoirs, and Why They're Bad

For me, this all began with a conversation about James Frey. You know James Frey: he's the chap who went on Oprah with a memoir about his life as an alcoholic, then ended up having to go back on Oprah to get ripped into, well, a million little pieces for having made a bunch of it up. In thinking his book a calamitous thing to happen to the world of letters, I didn't imagine I was being particularly original or controversial. But then I happened to use it as an offhand example of something in conversation, and all of a sudden I found myself meeting with resistance. "What's wrong with A Million Little Pieces?" I was asked. "So what if it's made up? All memoirs are made up! If readers get something out of it, what's the problem?"¹

Since then I've been curious about what exactly the problem is. Because surely there is one. What I want to do here is to make some suggestions about what it could be, why people like my interlocutor don't seem to acknowledge it, and how the world would be a better place if they did. We'll see that it isn't, in reality, obligatory to make everything up; that memory isn't completely unreliable; that we're not entirely at its mercy anyway; and that while interpretation and sequencing may change the significance of events, they don't change the events themselves. We'll see that there are practical, ethical, and aesthetic advantages to not being, and not rewarding, barefaced liars. We'll see that the world needs memoirs, just as it needs works of fiction. We'll see that fictions can do things memoirs can't do, but that memoirs can also do things fictions—even autobiographical fictions—can't do. And we'll see that the memoir genre could not survive if we took it to be, like fiction, a matter of pure invention. Trust me, I'm not making this up.

I

Let's start by admitting that James Frey didn't act quite as egregiously as some. Five years after Frey's memoir came out, a guy named Herman Rosenblat wrote one of his own—Angel at the Fence—detailing the extraordinary circumstances under which he met his wife, Roma. Herman, you see, was a young Jewish child trapped in Buchenwald, and Roma was a young German child who used to throw him apples through the fence, in a highly risky act of generosity. After the war they found each other again, got married, and lived happily ever after. Oprah called this the "greatest love story" she'd ever heard. It got turned into a children's book. It almost got turned into a major motion picture.² Then it came out that the whole apple thing was baloney; the movie got shelved, the children's book got pulled, the memoir got canceled, and poor Oprah had to recant again, just as she did with Frey.

There had already been two cases like this back in the 1990s, Binjamin Wilkormiski's Fragments (1995) and Misha Defonseca's Survivre avec les loups (1997).³ Binjamin Wilkormiski, Holocaust survivor, turned out to be Bruno Grosjean, a regular Swiss guy. Misha Defonseca turned out, surprise surprise, not to have been sheltered by packs of wolves, killed a German soldier, or wandered into the Warsaw Ghetto and then escaped. Like Grosjean, she was an average non-Jewish kid, and she was in Brussels minding her own business for the entire war.⁴

Similar license was taken by one Margaret B. Jones, who, in the same year as Herman Rosenblat's rise to notoriety, wrote a memoir (Love and Consequences, 2008) about her rough start in life as a half–Native American child living in South Central Los Angeles. It talked about her joining the Bloods, running drugs for them, carrying a gun, and all kinds of other exciting things. In reality, Margaret B. Jones—sorry, Margaret Seltzer—turned out to be a fairly ordinary middle...