Syndicate and Hague

In the last week, there have been two “memoirs” whose authors have been outed as more than just embellishing the truth. In both situations, we have something that would be cast one way as fiction–but when passed off as memoir, these works become harmful.

First, and less publicized, was a Holocaust memoir:

A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy.

This just tears me. Once you decide to alter the world a narrative lives in, you need to take responsibility for it. What are the reasons to masquerade a fictional tale as memoir? For someone like James Frey, it was that juicy memoirs get published–so he added more than embellishments to his story. That, to me, is harmless enough–also a laugh at the publishing industry. You know, ‘you wouldn’t publish my fiction so I fictionalized my memoir and it sold like crazy, jerks.’ Or something to that effect.

But fictionalizing a memoir about the Holocaust? On what planet is that a good idea? It’s one thing for a writer to write a fictional memoir, quite another to write a fictional memoir and pass it off as real.

Then there was Margaret B. Jones. You know, a half-white, half-American Indian raised in poverty in the foster system who was enmeshed in gangs and drugs. Er. Wait. No, that’s Margaret Seltzer. The white, well-off girl who was raised by her biological family. Potato, potahto.

Jones, 33, admitted to the Times that her memoir was fully fabricated. Many of the experiences recounted in the book, she told the newspaper, were based on the experiences of friends she had met while doing anti-gang outreach in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn, and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” she told the paper.

I call bullshit. Memoirs are profitable business right now–if you expose yourself and you’re interesting enough…well…you get book deals and movies. Let’s ignore, for the purposes of this blog post, that there are tricky details that happen whenever you try to represent others’ voices (because I think creative people have every right to step out of their lives and into others’ in their work).

Instead, let’s rant:

Margaret–you wanted to give the people you wrote about a voice? Why didn’t you write a biography, a memoir of your time doing gang outreach, an essay, a book about the gangs, a fictional world of the gangs inspired by the real world? Same goes for you, Misha. You wanted to publish, you wanted money, you didn’t want to give voice to anyone. You fetishized and capitalized on the pain and hard lives of others and you SUCK.

I want to reinforce again that I think writers should write what suits their fancy. And if you want to write a fake memoir because it seems to fit what you want the work to do–go ahead, but it better be shelved on the fiction shelves (meaning: you say you wrote a memoir of a fictional character - or a character inspired by a real person(s)). Dammit.