Fake memoir  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Fake memoirs are a category of literary mystification in which a wholly or partially fabricated memoir or journal of an individual is presented as fact. Sometimes, the purported author of the work also is fabricated. In recent years, there have been a number of such memoirs published by major publishers, some of which were well received critically and even became best sellers, but which subsequently were shown to be partly or completely fabricated.

Novels presented as memoirs also fall into this category, as well as epistolary novels.

20th century

A number of recent fake memoirs fall into the category of "misery lit," where the author claims to have overcome illness, abuse, drug or alcohol addiction or other serious trauma. Several similarly are fabricated stories of supposed Holocaust survivors.

As a result of the recent series of best seller memoirs that have turned out to be fabricated, there have been calls for stronger vetting of new authors and fact checking of their books.

List of Fake Memoirs and Journals

(In reverse chronological order.)

• Margaret B. Jones (pseud. Margaret Seltzer), Love and Consequences, Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin Group USA) (2008), a critically received memoir of a girl, part white and part native American, growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child in a world of drug dealers and gang members. In fact, the work was completely fabricated.
• JT LeRoy (pseud. Laura Victoria Albert) published a number of fabricated writings (c. 2005) in which LeRoy was presented as a transgendered, sexually questioning, abused, former homeless teenage drug addict and male prostitute

• James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, Doubleday Books (2003), a best selling memoir in which the author created and exaggerated significant details of his drug addiction and recovery.

• Norma Khouri, Forbidden Love (also published as Honor Lost in the United States), Bantam Books, Australia (2003); Doubleday, New York (2003), is the story of her best friend in Jordan, Dalia, who fell in love with a Christian soldier. Dalia's Muslim father was not told of the relationship, and when he eventually discovered it, he stabbed Dalia to death in a so-called honor killing.

• Michael Gambino (actually Michael Pelligrino) wrote the The Honored Society, Simon & Schuster (2001). The book, supposedly by the grandson of Mafioso Carlo Gambino, described his life as a gangster, including spending 12 years in prison for bribery, gambling, extortion, kidnapping, money laundering, murder and pimping. Carlo Gambino’s real son, Thomas Gambino, exposed the fraud, and the publisher withdrew the book.

• Nasdijj (pseud. Timothy Patrick "Tim" Barrus), wrote The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, Houghton Mifflin (2000), The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping (2003), and Geronimo's Bones : A Memoir of My Brother and Me (2004). These works recounted various aspects of the author's supposed life, including his Navajo heritage, his self-destructive and abusive parents, his unhappy childhood as a migrant worker, his dysfunctional relationships with other family members, and, eventually, his growing up to become the nurturing father of first an adopted child with fetal alcohol syndrome and then one who is HIV-positive.

• Misha Defonseca (real name: Monique de Wael), Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, Mt. Ivy Press (1997), a fabricated memoir of a supposed Holocaust survivor who walked 1900 miles across Europe searching for her parents, killed a German officer in self-defense and lived with a pack of wolves. The work was a best seller, translated into 18 languages and was made into a movie.

• Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments, Shocken Books (US edition, 1996), an acclaimed but fabricated Holocaust memoir.

• Helen Demidenko (pseud. Helen Dale), wrote The Hand That Signed the Paper, Allen & Unwin, Australia (1994). presented as a supposedly autobiographical story of a student’s discovery of her family's bleak wartime history as peasants in Ukraine under Stalinism and their “liberation” by the Nazi invasion. The book won a number of awards.

• Anthony Godby Johnson wrote A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story, Crown Books, New York; Little Brown, London (1993), a story of a young boy, sexually abused by his parents and later adopted, who discovers he is HIV-positive boy and who develops AIDS. This book has been challenged on a number of accounts and has been alleged to be the fictional product of Vicki Johnson , also known as Vicki Fraginals Zackheim.

• Konrad Kujau forged The Hitler Diaries in 1983. When first published in the Sunday Times, the diaries were authenticated by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, but they were demonstrated to be crude fakes, written on modern paper, within a few weeks.

• Forrest Carter (pseud. Asa Earl Carter), The Education of Little Tree, Delacorte Press (1976). An acclaimed book about growing up among the Cherokee indians, in fact fiction written by a former white supremacist.

• Clifford Irving, The Autobiograpy of Howard Hughes, McGraw-Hill (1972). A fabricated autobiography of the recluse billionaire.

• Anonymous (actually Beatrice Sparks), Go Ask Alice, Prentice-Hall (1971), purportedly the diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the late 1960s. Sparks is known for producing a number of books purporting to be the "real diaries" of troubled teenagers.

• Carlos Castaneda wrote a series of books that describe his training in traditional Mesoamerican shamanism, starting with The Teachings of Don Juan, University of California Press (1968). His 12 books have sold more than 8 million copies in 17 languages. It is disputed whether his stories are truthful or fabricated.

• Edmund Backhouse wrote China Under the Empress Dowager: being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi, Compiled from State Papers and the Private Diary of the Comptroller of her Household, London, Heinemann; Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co. (1910). The diary on which the book was based was later shown to have been fabricated by Backhouse.

• Maria Monk Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk : as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery at Montreal, Howe & Bates, New York (1836). The book is a wildly sensationalistic story of life in a Montreal convent where nuns were forced to have sex with the priests in the seminary next door. The book may have been written by Theodore Dwight, John J. Slocum or William K. Hoyte.

See also

literary mystification, unreliable narrator, memoir, histories (history of the novel), false document, Dubious and scandalous histories, 1660-1720

• Literary forgeries and mystifications
• Misery lit