Fake memoirs seem all the rage nowadays. There was Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, the story of a teenage gangbanger in Los Angeles that turned out to be written by a middle class white suburban woman. Then there was Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, the story of a child Holocaust survivor who was tended to by wolves, which probably should have surprised nobody when it was exposed as a fabrication. And who can forget JT Leroy, who authored the tellingly titled The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, which told of his experiences as a transgendered teenage male prostitute, despite having been authored by a middle aged woman. Minnesota has already been involved in at least two forged memoirs: Most notoriously, James Frey’s fictionalized tale of Hazelden horror, a Million Little Pieces; Somewhat less known is my own fake memoir (not sure why it has never caught on; after all, I was kidnapped by mole men.) Now a Minnesota publishing house finds itself at the center of a new fake memoir controversy. Lerner Publishing Group published a children’s book about a true romance between a concentration camp inmate and the young woman who threw apples over the fence to him. The trouble? It wasn’t true.
The Latest in Fake Memoir News
Jan 1 2009 — 2:43am
18 Reader Comments
8:48 am
Well, I find the Sparber piece possessed of a certain truthiness. I think his mistake was putting “a fake memoir” in the title. Something like that casts a “credibility cloud” over even the most verisimilitudinous of anecdotes.
I think now the fake memoir is a genre of its own and publishers enjoy the free press of a “controversy.” I should write one about my year in the XFL.
9:35 am
Oh, I know. I’m going to write a fake memoir about a how a fake memoir catapulted me to fame and fortune, and the public shame that followed its exposure as a fraud by a nosy blogger. It’s my idea, nobody touch it.
9:47 am
Enjoyed the mole men stuff when I read it in John Hodgman’s book…in 2006.
10:06 am
Kurtis, you could be the nosy blogger! And then expose yourself (heh) as the nosy blogger.
10:13 am
Ooh, burn, anonymous. I enjoyed it when it was the theme of a Superman movie in 1951.
But you go ahead and take me down a notch, you brilliant anonymous internet scamp, you.
10:22 am
I enjoyed them when they fought against a Lavaman with the help of The Tick in 1994…
10:30 am
My favorite moleman:
10:30 am
I have a story in there about selling my soul at the crossroad to the devil to learn to play guitar. I imagine Anonymous will pop in at any moment to tell me he enjoyed that when the Coen Brothers put it in O Brother, Where Art Thou.
10:54 am
Perhaps it’ll be Ralph Macchio from the movie Crossroads in 1986 — if he/she is of that vintage.
11:12 am
The Rat might write a memoir of his years as a riverboat gambler.
11:20 am
Oh, I assumed the crossroads reference was a rip-off of this Crossroads.
11:53 am
That completely explains Britney Spears!!!
12:55 pm
Drat, Jane, I was saving that big surprise for later.
1:29 pm
I like Gawker’s look at all the fake memoirists who have appeared on Oprah. Which, from now on, should be red flag that the author is fibbing.
5:31 pm
Bastion of journalistic integrity, the Gawkers.
10:24 am
And the irony is that fiction writers are always suspected of writing autobiography.
10:58 am
Lilian Nattel, you’re over in Toronto, right? So, you’re further south than we are in the TC.*
Have you heard any more about that movement for the Upper Midwest to be merged into Canada?
Is there a TR** equivalent of MNspeak? I should go say hello.
* Note I did not call us Twinsies or whatever.
**TR is the AP code for Toronto.
10:20 pm
The Rosenblat story is so sad. Why is Atlantic Pictures making a film based on a lie? Why didn’t Oprah check the story out before publicizing it, especially after James Frey and given that many bloggers like Deborah Lipstadt said in 2007 that the Rosenblat’s story couldn’t be true.
Genuine love stories from the Holocaust do exist. My favorite is the one about Dina Gottliebova Babbitt – the beautiful young art student who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children’s barracks at Auschwitz to cheer them up. This painting became the reason Dina and her Mother survived Auschwitz. After the end of the war, Dina applied for an art job in Paris. Unbeknownst to Dina, her interviewer was the lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They fell in love and got married. It’s such a romantic love story. Another reason I love Dina’s story is the tremendous courage she had to paint the mural in the first place. Painting the mural for the children caused her to be taken to Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he made her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber.
Dina’s story is also verified to be true. Some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. The story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children’s barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also documented.
Why wasn’t the Rosenblatt’s story checked out before it was published and picked up to have the movie made?? I would like to see true and wonderful stories like Dina’s be publicized, not these hoax tales that destroy credibility and trust.