Faked Memoir Cancelled

Another case of ready fire aim. Everyone was on board, including Oprah.

http://news.bostonherald.com/entertainment/books/view/2008_12_28_Anger__sadness_over_fabricated_Holocaust_story/

Wish they'd gotten away with publishing and an advance, frankly. I LOVE stuff like that.

What a shame. In fact, wasn't Oprah taken in by someone not long ago who wrote about recovering from addiction? I bet she has her guard up now!

The sad thing is the guy actually was in concentration camps but instead of telling the true story he embellished it.

In my book, When My Husband Went to War in 1962, there are two men who gave accounts of the same harrowing experience. The second stated that some of this account would be different than the other, "but that doesn’t mean one isn’t correct." This was a very intense experience and each had their own memories, but the book this article is speaking of is about someone not being truthful.

This is not going to help get my book published!!

And, yes, Dick that is sad.

Carol

What irony! I wrote The Power of Persuasion as a work of fiction and yet people still ask me if it's a biography -- even when they admit that Beth is not me!

Why did he have to say it was factual if it was fiction based on some facts? Do memoirs receive bigger advances than works of fiction?

He could have said that it was 'inspired' by his own experiences of surviving the Holocaust. Fiction based in fact. That's what I've been doing with The Wonderful Demise of Benjamin Arnold Guppy. A lot of what's in the book did happen, but I didn't kill anyone so it's obviously fiction.

In my book, Flow On Sweet Missouri, a historical novel based on family I state the following in the introduction:

I have given my ancestors personalities, thoughts, feelings, actions, and life events that have come from facts of their lives, culture of the time, as well as my imagination, inspiration, and that mysterious place where writers sometimes find themselves that feels more like reality than reality itself.

Carol

Here's how I handled this problem in The Last of the South Town Rinky Dinks.
_______________________________________


So yes, we were the last of the South Town Rinky Dinks. The original ones. And this book is dedicated to those of us still living who will read these words and remember, and to those of us who have passed on, who will look down, or up, as the case may be, and laugh when they see the looks on the faces of the Rinky Dinks as they’re taken back in time.

There is one thing I want you to understand and remember as you read these pages. I'm writing this book from the viewpoint of a young boy, somewhere between ten and fifteen years old. I want it to reflect the innocence of the times, and I felt that too much research, or too many so called "true facts" might take away from the books real feeling. If any of you lived there during that time and these stories are not exactly as you remember them, I apologize. I'm writing what I was told as a kid, what I remember from those times, and I'm trying to put myself back inside the head of the kid I was then, and not let too much of the man I've become influence the stories.

Perhaps there will be a book two of the South Town Rinky Dinks stories, and if so, I'd welcome any input you may have. But until then, I hope you enjoy what I've written, because even though the way I tell the stories may not be exactly the way you remember them all, I'll bet you remember your version of every page.

I think the problem is that the industry is desperate for big sellers and they ignore warning signs. A memoir doesn't have to come from a big name if the story is compelling enough. The problem is that unlike fiction with drama, finding someone that has lived a story compelling enough is rare. Even if you find that true story, how much is fact vs big fish story by the time it gets on paper. People tend to be in awe of the actual subject of the memoir, but really, how many Mother Teresa's, Barack Obama's or Nelson Mandellas are really out there without a lot of stretching of the truth.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/01/22/memoir_as_fiction_not_so_fast/

The lack of vetting is often the reason given from major media outlets as to why they don't review or feature self-published books. It seems that lack of vetting is not something confined only to self publishers.

Thanks for the link to the article DT! It's hard to have any sympathy with the gullible public who were only willing to buy the book if it was all true and continued buying the book when media interest stimulated their desire to find out what all the fuss was about.

It would seem that the public has an insatiable appetite for reading about other people's suffering if they believe it is true and an equally insatiable appetite if they are told that a book is full of lies -- which they want to read for themselves!

Art it is not.

They are running out of holocaust stories. That whole generation is dying out. Holocaust stories are probably the easiest things to sell in the US market.

For sociopolitical reasons kind of hard to explain to non US types, question holocaust accounts is a scary thing to do.

The moment people started saying the story couldn't have happened the way he said it did, I wondered why he didn't just say it was fiction.

Malcolm