Memoir Fraud

One would think that after the fiasco with James Frey's A Million Little Pieces a few years ago publishers would be more diligent in verifying the backgrounds of writers. Apparently not. Just in the last week two authors have admitted that their memoirs were complete fiction.

The first, Misha Defonseca, author of Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which was translated into 18 languages and adapted for the French feature film Surviving With Wolves, admitted that the story is completely false. She said, "The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving."

Margaret B. Jones, author of Love and Consequences, which was published last week 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, also admitted her story is completely false. She said "I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to...I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk."

While this is completely reprehensible on the part of the authors, I can't help but put a certain amount of blame on these publishers. If they are publishing a memoir, shouldn't they have some sort of responsibility to verify that the works they publish are truthful? Their negligence is insulting to consumers and insulting to the people who actually lived through these difficult situations. In the case of Margaret Jones, it seems like a simple background check would have unmasked the deception. What makes this worse is that there are honest people who write wonderful, moving, truthful memoirs, but because of writers (and publishers) like this, a shadow of doubt will always fall over their work.