WRITINGS NON-FICTION On Fake Writers (Again) Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, you're ready to publish your memoir. And so it all begins again. The revelation that one Margaret B. Jones, author of a memoir about growing up as a mixed-race foster child on the gangster-ridden streets of South Central L.A., was in fact Margaret Seltzer, a lily-white product of suburban Episcopal schools, is just the latest in a series of high-profile literary frauds. Many of us still remember Oprah Winfrey opening an industrial-sized can of whup-ass on fake tough-guy James Frey for fabricating much of A Million Little Pieces, the supposedly true story of his recovery from drug addiction. And then there was JT LeRoy, the wispy little former boy prostitute turned autobiographical novelist, who turned out, in fact, to be Laura Albert, a fortyish writer from San Francisco. But methinks, these scandellettes are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Number one, what is a memoir to begin with? Oh yes, it's the story of a life. Why is this life worth reading about? Because the author has accomplished something remarkable, like, say, discovering the secrets of DNA or the origin of the species, and wants to tell the tale of his struggles and tribulations? Well, not always. In fact, more and more often these days, these volumes are narratives of people who've made a spectacular hash of their lives. And why are these stories worth reading? Well, everybody has screwed up something in their lives, so it's nice to have company and even better to read about somebody who is perhaps even more of a mess than yourself. Fair enough. But do you really remember enough of the details of your life, exactly as they happened, to form a coherent book-length narrative? Probably not. And even if you did—be honest—wouldn't the long boring stretches drive even your most intimate caring friend to the TV listings? So you juice it up a little. Cut out the boring parts, compress some of the more drawn-out incidents, create a few colorful composite characters. Already, you've taken your first giant step on the road toward prevarication. So why not write a novel instead? You're making some of it up anyway. Ah, but novels are a tough sell. You might need some actual skill or style to put your story across. And, face it, who wants to interview some muttering, recessive, sweater-wearing novelist for a television talk show or an off-the-book page feature? No, call it a memoir. Call yourself a Survivor. Present your suffering in high-definition large-than-life florid colors. Now there's something you can promote on the Today Show and Good Morning America. It happens over and over again. For every Seltzer and Frey who get caught, there's at least twelve who get away with cutting inconvenient corners off their stories, exaggerating their personal drama, or outright bullshitting on the page. I'm not saying that every memoirist lies, but I suspect that even the best and most honest of them, like Mary Karr, have to go off the rails to some extent. After all, she called her book The Liars' Club—though, since I wrote this, Karr published a persuasive op-ed piece in the Times admitting the fallibility of memory, but arguing, persuasively, that she at least tried to be accurate. Also, she's a very talented writer and I think her book would stand up under any heading, fiction or nonfiction. Most of the other entries in this overcrowded field can't make that claim. A few years back, I reviewed a popular book called Sleepers for a newspaper and believe me a bigger bunch of hokum has rarely been published between two hard covers. Angels with dirty faces from Hell's Kitchen come back to take vengeance on the rotten screws who beat and abused them when they were locked up for some childhood prank...Oh for Chrissakes, I can hardly think about it anymore. But it was offered, straight-faced, as a nonfiction title by a major publishers' house, even though Cagney himself would've crumpled it up and dismissed it as a load of old-fashioned malarkey back in 1939. When for once, a few other writers also pointed out that the book was plainly preposterous, its defenders shrugged and said, in essence, "Who cares? It's a good story. What's the difference if it's not all God's literal truth? Something like that probably happened." All right, so big deal. It's always been that way. The earliest cave drawings probably exaggerated the size of the buffalos. Half the great statesmen of the world likely embellished some part of their biographies, to build themselves up. James Gordon Bennett, the Scottish newspaper man, once famously remarked that many a good story has been ruined by oververification. Seltzer and Frey are two pretty small drops in that ocean. Just the same, something about the trend that they exemplify doesn't sit very easily. Maybe it's because every phony memoir that succeeds makes it a little harder for an honest one to gain traction. The standard for drama gets higher and higher. I'll see your root canal without Novocain and raise you an abusive childhood with a mother who made me turn tricks in drag at a truck stop. And the resulting Grand Guignol can-you-top-this soap opera distorts our sense of what makes a life worth writing about. After you've read about somebody spitting up blood in the airport lounge and shooting up with cross-dressing heroin addicts, who has patience for all the quotidian details and subtle struggles that the rest of us go through? Or maybe it's just that our standard for truth has gotten lower. The critic Robert Hughes once said of Ronald Reagan, "He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies." I think that the same thing has been going on for years in this memoir game and each artificially inflated "true life" tale of woe joins with each "reality" TV show to make us a little more tolerant of lies and a little less discerning about what's real. © Peter Blauner