Monday, March 03, 2008

No more memoirs!

Two more fake memoirs, here, and, perhaps more interestingly, here.

You know what, I'm not even going to talk about the details, because it just isn't interesting anymore.

Speaking to the general reader, what's with you people? This wouldn't happen if you didn't have some strange "fact" fetish. Who cares if the story is true? Go buy a novel, you losers. It's what you're doing already, so why not just go buy a good novel instead of a bad one disguised as a memoir?

1 comment:

Tim said...

"She came under pressure to defend her book after Sharon Sergeant, a genealogical researcher in Waltham, Mass., said she had found clues in the unpublished United States version of the book."

Do you know what my clue is? This woman claimed that she was rescued by and lived with wolves who saved her from the Nazis. Wolves. How credulous do we need to be?

The common thread in the vast majority of these memoir cases -- that is the memoirs that are very nearly invented wholesale, rather than lying about or distorting a handful of facts or events -- is that the memoir hinges not just on biographical experiences the writer never had but on a relatively rare, marginalized identity that is interesting to us for extraliterary reasons. Maybe we just don't need to hear the story of a half-Indian gang member raised by a black foster mother. No matter how good the pitch is, no matter what a great press campaign it would be, no matter what a great get that signing would be, maybe we just don't need to hear it. They call these stories "too good to be true" for a reason.