45. UNRELIABLE MEMORIES AD 1997

FAKE MEMOIRS

Just where does nonfiction end and fiction begin? Although this question has been the subject of endless debate, many consider the distinction an entirely artificial one. After all, human memory is famously unreliable. Eyewitness testimony, once the gold standard for evidence in courts throughout the nation, has turned out to be hugely fickle, and scientists have figured out that every time you take a recollection out of your mental memory bank and dust it off, you risk returning it to storage in slightly altered form. And there is, of course, even a well-established genre of fictionalized nonfiction, of which Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood is probably the most widely known example.

Still, when it comes to writing a personal memoir, it might seem reasonable to expect a certain degree of accuracy, plus or minus the vagaries of recollection. But even though truth may be stranger than fiction, some memoirists have evidently thought it desirable to deliberately embellish the one with the other. Indeed, some have seen fit to make up the entire thing.

Margaret B. Jones, here wearing a black hoodie and flashing a Bloods gang bandanna, described the tattoo of a large, weeping pit bull on her back that memorialized a friend’s scheduled execution as “the most ghetto thing on my body.” Her memoir, Love and Consequences, was an intimate, visceral portrait of a mixed-race white and Native American foster child growing up in drug-infested South Central Los Angeles. It was a complete fabrication.

One of the most extreme recent cases of this kind was “Margaret B. Jones” (real name Margaret Seltzer), who wrote Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival as an allegedly truthful account of growing up as a racially mixed foster child on the mean and gang-infested streets of South Central Los Angeles, when she was actually raised in a comfortable middle-class white family in affluent Sherman Oaks. As a total fabrication, this 2000 memoir—withdrawn by the publisher in short order when the deception was exposed—ranks with Misha Defonseca’s “autobiographical” 1997 Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which spun a fantastical yarn about a child who, at the age of six, lost her parents to deportation, and subsequently wandered around occupied Europe in search of them, at one point under the protection of friendly wolves and at another killing a menacing German soldier.

The Holocaust genre has actually attracted more than its fair share of fabrications, although more commonly in the context of accounts based on some degree of actual personal experience. This seems to have been the case with Herman Rosenblat’s 2003 Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived. Rosenblat had actually been imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, but his central account of having been thrown apples over the fence by a young farm girl—whom he later married following a chance meeting in Coney Island after the war—was clearly made up, since given the documented layout of the camp it was logistically impossible. After suspicions were raised and the book was pulled from the market before publication, Rosenblat confessed all on The Oprah Winfrey Show. But he still insisted that he retained his “dream” image of the apple drama.

In James Frey’s harrowing memoir, A Million Little Pieces, describing his years as an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal, he claimed he had been repeatedly arrested and incarcerated for months at a time. In fact, the closest Frey ever came to a jail cell was the few hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post a $733 cash bond (The Smoking Gun).

One of the most aggressive and widely publicized literary scandals of recent times involved the writer James Frey, whose 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, brought Oprah to public tears and which—largely thanks to the publicity this incident gave it—sold well over 3 million copies. It told a gut-wrenching and vomit-filled story of a criminal drug addict with a drinking problem and horrific prison experience, and it was packed with frequently violent incidents that, the Smoking Gun website later alleged, had at the very least been richly embroidered. In the end, the publishers added a disclaimer to future editions of the book and offered to give any customers who felt duped their money back. Surprisingly, or maybe not, few took up this offer; and Frey himself continues to flourish as a media producer.

Sometimes even the author himself turns out to be entirely fictitious. The Albanian playwright Jiri Kajane labored precariously in isolated Tirana under the tyrannical rule of Enver Hoxha, achieving a single performance of his play Neser Perdite (“Tomorrow Every Day”) before it was banned by the culture ministry. Subsequently he wrote a string of short stories which, even after Hoxha’s death in 1985, he felt it too dangerous to publish in his home country: many of them featured a character known as the Deputy Minister of Slogans, a clear dig at the regime.

Editors in the West eagerly published Kajane’s work, however, and one story was featured in a prestigious American anthology alongside such literary luminaries as Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene, and Ernest Hemingway. One magazine declared him to be “Albania’s second greatest living writer,” trailing only the prizewinning author Ismail Kadare.

Only it turned out that Kajane didn’t actually exist. He was the fictitious creation of the FBI agent Kevin Phelan (who had posed as Kajane’s translator) and Bill U’Ren, at one time a psychological coach to the San Diego Padres. The pair had met in a creative writing class at UCLA and had discovered that their stories were more salable set in Albania and submitted under Kajane’s name than they were set in the United States and submitted under their own. Now you can buy the entertaining book Winter in Tirane credited to the real authors, with Kajane as “narrator.”

You might expect other writers to be particularly censorious about these and many other fraudulent episodes. After all, it is the veracity of their profession that is at stake. But despite the odd lawsuit, writerly attitudes to the exposure of literary hoaxes have actually been pretty relaxed in recent years. And the issue is indeed not a straightforward one. Were the intrinsic literary merits (such as they might have been) of any of these works diminished by their outing as frauds? And is there really a bright line to be drawn between admitted fiction and the (sometimes) inevitable fictive elements of nonfiction?

Phelan asked a good question when he wondered out loud why, if readers had liked the stories when they thought an Albanian had written them, they should like them any less when they knew their true authorship (see also chapter 34, Fake Art). And Professor Sue Vice, now of the University of Sheffield, has been among those urging thinking before condemning: “If memoirs include even a small amount of fictional or reconstructed material, they may be judged as wholly worthless, even though they may have value in literary or psychological terms that exceeds their truth value.”