In the New York Sun, Kate Taylor explores “Why Publishers Don’t Fact-Check Memoirs“:

As one person in publishing who asked not to be named said: “You couldn’t get these books out the door, at least not below a $100-a-copy price point, and then nobody would buy them.”

In the context of product liability suits, courts in fact have ruled that publishers are not responsible for independently verifying the accuracy of their books.

On Slate, Meghan O’Rourke asks, “Why are book editors so bad at spotting fake memoirs?” And also “How much leeway does a disclaimer really give an author?” Well, the article is a couple of years old, but it’s certainly not out-of-date (”Lies and Consequences“):

The original function of a disclaimer - which commonly read, “Names and identifying details have been changed” - was to protect the publisher from being sued by people who recognized themselves in an author’s portrait. The disclaimers offered by Frey and Lerner, however, serve the opposite purpose. These disclaimers protect the authors from our realization that the people in their “nonfiction” books are not real people at all . . .

Obviously, in the post-Frey era, editors will show more due diligence.

In the Washington Post, Bob Thompson asks, “So how come you guys didn’t make a phone call or two?” (”True or False: Book Publishers Can Avoid the Agony of Deceit“):

Take the fake-memoir scandal that immediately preceded the Jones/Seltzer affair. As the Associated Press reported last week, the author of “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years” has admitted that she didn’t “live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis.”

Lived with a pack of wolves, people! Make a couple of calls!

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich tracks the fallout of another literary fraud (”Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud“), and got Seltzer’s editor, Sarah McGrath, to explain their rigorous vetting process:

"In the post-James Frey world, we all are more careful," Ms. McGrath said. "I had numerous conversations with her about the need to be honest and the need to stick to the facts." 

Of course, the New York Times‘ own profile of Seltzer, the thing that got it all started, was wholly credulous:

Mimi Read, a freelance reporter, wrote a profile of Ms. Seltzer that appeared on Thursday in the House & Home section of The New York Times and did not question the memoirist’s story.

"The way I look at it is that it’s just like when you get in a car and drive to the store - you assume that the other drivers on the road aren’t psychopaths on a suicide mission," said Ms. Read, who was never told Ms. Seltzer’s real name by the publisher or by Ms. Seltzer. "She seemed to be who she said she was. Nothing in her home or conversation or happenstance led me to believe otherwise.")

And Galleycat begins the search for Seltzer’s sources:

But another reader, taking note of Seltzer’s false claims to Native American heritage, spotted what could have been another red flag in Love and Consequences: Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, which Seltzer is sure to have read while pursuing that ethnic studies degree she never quite picked up from the University of Oregon, also features a wise maternal character named “Big Mom.”

And Seltzer’s publisher is sad (”Riverhead “Saddened” by Love and Consequences Scandal“).

As for myself, I keep thinking about a part of Motoko Rich’s story yesterday, in which she described the roles of Inga Muscio and Faye Bender in encouraging Seltzer to tell “her” story:

Ms. Seltzer said she had been writing about her friends’ experiences for years in creative-writing classes and on her own before a professor asked her to speak with Inga Muscio, an author who was then working on a book about racism. Ms. Seltzer talked about what she portrayed as her experiences and Ms. Muscio used some of those accounts in her book. Ms. Muscio then referred Ms. Seltzer to her agent, Faye Bender, who read some pages that Ms. Seltzer had written and encouraged the young author to write more.

Seltzer certainly has to take responsibility for her own fabrication, and yet the desire of a student to please a professor, or an unpublished writer to please just about anyone, is powerful. I can imagine a scenario in which the whole thing started with a couple of fibs (”well, it makes the story better if I do it like this“) and then snowballs from there. Ishmael Beah seems to have been encouraged a lot, too, and his inaccuracies may have begun at a point when he didn’t even imagine his writings would ever become a published book.

And, on Salon (”Worst Publishing Week Ever“), Daniel Engber asks, “What’s next?”

A prominent human rights activist in Sudan has accused fiction writer Dave Eggers of failing to make up key passages in his recent novel What Is the What. The book purports to give a non-nonfictional account of a real-life child refugee who endured years of starvation and violence in Darfur. “I want to know how this passed the sniff-test with his editors,” said Howard Goldenschmidt of Darfur-NOW. “I mean, man-eating lions? It’s just too good to be not true.”
- Associated Press, April 19, 2008

Frankly, I think boys and girls now have too many options for everything: danger, mischief, and…um, stuff.

Much as I like Colson Whitehead (Apex Hides the Hurt, 2006), I wasn’t even planning to read his essay in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, let alone link to it. One look at the headline (”I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It.“) and I already felt fatigued. Bad enough that New York City is seen by so many as the citadel of fine writing–when it gets down to the borough-pride thing I like to think instead about some of the great writers we have here in the Midwest, like Richard Powers (The Echo Maker, 2006). Although many of the rest of them have moved to New York.

But I misunderstood the headline, and I’m glad I read the rest of the piece. It’s very, very funny.

There was the famous case of the language poet from Red Hook who grew despondent when the Shift key on her MacBook broke. She couldn’t write for weeks. Overcome by melancholy humors, she jumped into the enchanted, glowing waters of the Gowanus Canal, her pockets full of stones. And … she was cured! The metaphors came rushing back. With eccentric spacing between the letters, but still. Now you see people jumping off the Union Street Bridge all the time. They scramble out in a hurry, trying to get home before they forget the first lines of their memoirs. Their hair falls out, but that’s the price you pay for artistic creation. 

And makes a point, too:

But you’d have to be a bit dense to confuse a geographical and economic accident with an aesthetic movement, no matter how sick you are of hearing about how green the grass is over here, no matter how much you long for that nurturing Elysium of your dreams.

More on the case of Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. On Slate, Blake Eskin asks Why did it take so long for a far-fetched Holocaust memoir to be debunked? Good question.

Why did people take her seriously for so long? Raising questions about the authenticity of someone’s Holocaust testimony, however implausible it seems, is a joyless task and one that puts you in unsavory company.

Oh, right. That.

But, boy, is it ever implausible. And there were plenty of people who didn’t buy it, even before it was published.

After a few problematic or outright fake memoirs whose nuances left me somewhat sympathetic to the authors, it’s kind of a relief to come across one that’s simply wrong, any way I look at it. From the New York Times (”Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction,” by Motoko Rich):

In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members.

Who dropped the dime? Seltzer’s big sister, who saw an article in the paper and called the book’s publisher, Riverhead. Seltzer confessed, though she claims she was lying for altruistic reasons:

"For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to," Ms. Seltzer said. "I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing - I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."

Yes, I often find that the best way to bring attention to someone else’s plight is to claim their problem as my own.

Seriously, although a number of people have proposed solutions to the problem of memoirs, how many more faked and flawed memoirs will have to be exposed before publishers come to some consensus about how the category is to be treated?

I still think the simplest thing is to assume that memoirs, like our memories, are flawed. And perhaps they should be shelved with fiction–any memoirs wanting to earn their stripes as nonfiction should offer footnotes or endnotes.

But, in any event, any time someone wants to publish a memoir about the tough times they’ve endured, the publishers owe it to everyone involved to make a half-dozen phone calls to verify the basic facts of the book. This one could have been caught pretty easily.

Update: The Booklist review of Love and Consequences. Starred. So maybe it still works as a novel.

More free-book madness. For the next month, you can read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free–as long as you don’t mind sitting at a computer with a live internet connection. On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow (Overclocked) gives it a bad review (the interface, not the book). Gaiman responds to that and another charge, as well:

I was surprised by a few emails coming in from people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away — the idea being, I think, that by handing out a bestselling book for nothing I’m devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly.

…

This is how people found new authors for more than a century. Someone says, “I’ve read this. It’s good. I think you’d like it. Here, you can borrow it.” Someone takes the book away, reads it, and goes, Ah, I have a new author.

Libraries are good things: you shouldn’t have to pay for every book you read.

(Read Booklist’s review of American Gods.)

Nicholson Baker, a print guy if there ever was one (Double Fold, 2001), falls in love with something that only lives on servers (”The Charms of Wikipedia,” TNYRB).

Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals - up to a point - the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were rendered entirely chaotic and obscene, there would be no joy in, for example, replacing some of the article on Archimedes with this:

Archimedes is dead.

He died.

Other people will also die.

All hail chickens.

The Power Rangers say “Hi”

The End.

The electronic world, it turns out, abets his love of all things archival.

I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, having seen it mentioned in Broughton’s manual: the ARS is a small group that opposes “extremist deletion.” And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that shouldn’t be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming, but some editors (for instance a patient librarian whose username is DGG) seem to be able to do it steadily week in and week out and stay sane. I, on the other hand, was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me - for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

I just can’t say enough about the novels of Richard Price. I really enjoyed Charles McGrath’s profile in the New York Times (”Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium“). Talking about his new novel, Lush Life, Price sounds almost as good in person as he is on the page:

He added that he originally thought of writing a historical novel, one that would dramatize the experience of the immigrant Jews who thronged the Lower East Side a hundred years ago. "But then I realized that’s probably the most well-documented immigrant movement in history," he said. "A guy comes over here, and his first job is working in a sweatshop. His second job is writing a novel about a guy working in a sweatshop. How am I going to do this better than Henry Roth did?"

And, for writers, some rich food for thought:

Another reason the book took so long is that Mr. Price felt obligated to the neighborhood - he wanted to get it right, all the chaos, all the texture - and wound up writing far too much. "I threw out 300 pages," he said. "Not voluntarily."

When he finally, reluctantly, showed the manuscript to his editor, he explained, it felt less like a submission than an intervention. "There was just so much here," he said, "and I fell in love with everything. I had two novels. It was as if my novel had had a novel. Congratulations, you’ve just had a nine-and-a-half-pound novel!" He shook his head and added, "You never really learn how to write a book, because every one is different."

From the New York Times, a brief note telling us that Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years (1997) is not a memoir but a novel. Her story still sounds sad enough.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Ms. Defonseca said: "The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost." Ms. Defonseca, who gave her real name as Monique De Wael, said her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis for Belgian resistance activities when she was 4; she was cared for by her grandfather and uncle.

Is it more depressing when fake memoirs deal with the heavy subjects than trivial matters? Certainly. Though there are exceptions, most people aren’t as angry at an author when they learn his wacky family wasn’t quite as wacky as depicted as they are when they learn that his empathy-earning tale of woe was manufactured.

Then again, the truth behind the lies is often murky. Defonseca may not have been raised by wolves, but if her parents really were killed by the Nazis, that could have caused a lifetime of psychic damage, and her fake memoir can be viewed partly in light of that. (Just as Ishmael Beah’s inaccuracies, whether great or small, don’t negate the larger circumstances of his story.)

But for calculating personalities–those who want to tell a big lie and reap some big rewards–the big tragedies have got to be the most tempting.

Update: More details in the Boston Globe (”Author admits making up memoir of surviving holocaust,” by David Mehegan).