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Five reasons why you should not write a fake memoir

It’s been a bad week for fake memoirists. The other day, Margaret B. Jones‘ “memoir” about her troubled youth as a drug runner in South Central L.A., Love and Consequences, was exposed as pure fiction.

It seems that Jones is actually Margaret Seltzer — a privileged, white Valley Girl who never lost foster brothers to gang violence or purchased a burial plot with drug money. Oops.

Days earlier, Misha Defonseca‘s 1997 memoir, Misha: A Mémoire of the Hollocaust Years, was unmasked as a fiction.

Defonseca’s story was even more outrageous than Seltzer’s tale of urban gang life. She claimed that as a Jewish Belgian child, she traveled 1,900 miles in search of her deported parents. Along the way, she killed a Nazi soldier, ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto and was adopted by a pack of wolves. As it turns out, she did survive the arrest and murder of her parents by Nazis, but she never left Belgium, never killed any soldiers and was never adopted by wolves. Oh, and she’s not Jewish.

Now, I generally try to avoid giving unsolicited advice, but I’m going to break that rule here: If you’re ever inclined to write an inspirational memoir about your life, base it on your actual life. If you’d rather make it all up, call it fiction. I think that’s good advice. And here are my reasons why.

1. You will probably get caught.

The internet makes it really easy to check facts these days. Remember when James Frey got busted for fabricating and embellishing many of the more dramatic elements of A Million Little Pieces? And Oprah Winfrey and his publisher and everyone who previously supported him were really embarrassed? Well, add two new high-profile fakes to the mix, and editors are probably going to start checking stories a little more carefully.

Of course, the fact that the

Misha publishers failed to seriously question the “raised by wolves” claim does make me think that perhaps I’m wrong about this.

2. Oprah might yell at you on national television.

So far this has only happened to James Frey.

But it had to be really embarrassing.

3. Your siblings will have the opportunity to exact revenge for all the things you did to them as a child.

Margaret Seltzer’s sister was the one who ratted her out, saying “It could have and should have been stopped before now.” And “I don’t know how [the publisher] do[es] business, but I would think that protocol would have them doing fact-checking.” (I would think so, too.) Ouch.

So if you’re tempted to write the great fake memoir, remember when you refused to let your little sister play Atari. And when you told on your brother after he held you down and spit on you. They might finally have the perfect opportunity to laugh the last laugh.

4. People will write really mean things about you in the reviews section of Amazon.com.

You can read the Love and Consequences comments here. And the Misha comments are here. They’re not very nice. And it’s not fun to read the comments of people who don’t like you or your writing.

5. You’ll forever be known as “the person who wrote the fake memoir about being raised by wolves.”

In all fairness, you’d have to write a memoir about being raised by wolves to get this moniker. (But I imagine you could get a number of other similarly embarrassing titles, many of which would include “liar” and perhaps “pants on fire.”)

Now, I honestly don’t want to dismiss or disparage Misha Defonseca’s clearly traumatic childhood. Violently losing your parents at a young age must be horrifying, and I can appreciate that a child would construct a heroic fantasy life to deal with the trauma. But publishing a memoir that claims you were raised by wolves? That is, perhaps, taking things a bit too far.

So, when you sit down to write your memoir, unless you actually were raised by wolves, you might want to stick to the more boring, but true, stories that probably won’t actually get you a book deal.

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