Comments on: I’m Shocked, Shocked To Find that Some Memoirs Are Fake

By: trapart

trapart — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:55:02 +0000

Being a deceiver is different to being a charlatan, to being a liar, to being a narrator, to being a visionary, a dreamer, being a storyteller, and listeners are different to followers, to believers, to fanatics.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:54:00 +0000

Can I plug a good memoir? J. R, Moehringher’s The Tender Bar. I never met JR, but I grew up with many of the people he writes about and can confirm much of the book from my own experience. Plus he’s a hell of a writer.

By: Neb Namwen

Neb Namwen — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:48:43 +0000

I’m disappointed, Tim. There’s a huge difference between fabulizing the truth and lying. Assuredly, all stories are expressions of self, but such expressions can be sincere or insincere. The holocaust survivor whose memories grow on the page is different from the “holocaust survivor” who was raised Protestant in Iowa. Of course, there are an indefinite number of shadings of verisimilitude, just as there are of sincerity.

Readers should be critical, and aware of the possibility of insincere authors, but I think we have a right to regard authors who purposefully mislead readers with a degree of contempt. An academic article based on false data or forged sources is likewise simply an expression of whatever impulse inclined its author to produce it. However, submitted to an academic journal, it becomes a lie. Fiction, worthy in itself, becomes fraud when it is published as non-fiction.

As for the significance of the author’s identity: It’s consistent with the idea that an author’s demographic profile doesn’t place a hard limit on those of his or her characters that there might be reasons for wanting to read a “memoir” which apply only when the author and the persona of the text have something in common.

A novel (I wouldn’t call it a memoir) about surviving the holocaust by someone who wasn’t there isn’t a travesty or appropriation or otherwise illegitimate, but there are things I might learn from a memoir that I can’t learn from the novel — not necessarily, as you point out, what happened, but what someone who was there would write. If I acquire, or am assigned to read, the novel for the purpose of learning those things, I’ve been deceived. If the author is otherwise known, then I am at fault for not doing a critical reader’s due diligence, but if the author is known solely as the person who wrote that text and got it published as memoir, there’s not much due diligence anyone but a detective can do. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for readers to think that, in such a case, the author or publisher or teacher (or whoever was the last person in the chain to know that the book is fiction) has done them some wrong.

By: evangoer

evangoer — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:40:16 +0000

Yes, yes, that’s all very nice. But what about the lying?

By: jpool

jpool — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:24:30 +0000

You name the decade of the 20th Century, and I can find you a well-known book or story that most readers took as true recountings of personal experience where there is serious reason to think most or all of that story is an invention. Can you do this at parties? This makes me all the more anxious to read Stephanie Newell's The Forger's Tale.

By: joeo

joeo — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:21:40 +0000

You are way too harsh on the audience for these memoirs. I am reading "among the thugs" and I would be real pissed if it turned out that the author just made the facts up. And I would be pissed at anyone who would later come along and say I should have known better because the English soccer team XYZ didn't even make the playoffs in 1987. A certain level of trust is to be expected when you read these things. At the same time, we could do a better job of asking why it is that socially privileged, basically comfortable, largely white readers have such an avid taste for tedious stories of suffering and loss whose only value is their naive claim to be literally true. Because they can be awesome?