The pattern is pretty clear: lying writer comes up with too-good-to-be-true tale; Oprah books them on her show; lying writer is showered with publisher money; lying writer is exposed as liar; and finally Oprah is shocked, shocked that a writer would dare lie to her. But after awhile, we're forced to wonder if she's the victim or part of the problem.

James Frey: From Idol to Intern
You all know this story, it's the granddaddy of Oprah embarrassments-turned-to-smackdowns. In his book A Million Little Pieces, Frey made some outlandish claims about waking up on an airplane (destination unknown) with all of his teeth broken and spending hard time in jail. Well as it turned out, the whole thing was just slightly exaggerated. The terrible thing is that—perhaps thinking that liking a story about drugs and swearing makes her seem cooler and hipper than fact-checking does— Oprah had made this her book of the month, which in the book world is the equivalent of the Pope farting into a nun's lady parts and creating an immaculately conceived religion robot. I mean, it's that big. So yeah Oprah was mad as hell and demanded that Frey come on her show so she could berate him for a decision that was, it's most likely, mainly made by his editors. Ah well. It all worked out in the end, though. Frey wrote another book and then became our dutiful manservant intern. Oprah was never embarrassed again. Oh. Wait.

Misha Defonseca: Not Actually Raised By Wolves
As we learned back in March, the book Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years turned out to be a fake. Imagine that! A story in which a little girl flees the Nazis (but manages to kill one) and is raised by wolves in the forest turns out to be untrue. Unbelievable. Because she and her viewers seem to really love the Holocaust, Oprah had taped a segment with Defonseca, whose real name is Monique De Wael and is not actually Jewish, but the lie was uncovered before the episode aired. Had the show actually gone to air and Oprah been publicly embarrassed, she would have fed Defonseca to the wolves that roam the North Country of Minnesota. A state she bought six months ago.

Margaret Seltzer: Defizzed
Margaret Jones was the pen name for a private school-educated white lady named Margaret Seltzer, who wrote a book called Love & Consequences about growing up tough in the sunshine-stained ghettos of Los Angeles. Trouble is, all was lies. Ratted out by her own sister. Brutal. She just made it up to be, I dunno, cool or something (or she had some sort of massive psychic break, who knows.) Thankfully Oprah didn't invite Seltzer Shakur onto her variety show, but her magazine O: A Magazine About Oprah did call it "[a] startlingly tender memoir." Maybe because it's street enough to remind people that Oprah is black, but white enough to remind Oprah fans that they are white and so is she, sort of. There was no official Oprah retaliation, but in private she probably did something. Something involving best friend Gayle. Something involving gardening shears and the Howdy Doody soundtrack. Something unpleasant.

Herman Rosenblat: When I Said 'Apple' I Meant 'Sandwich,' and When I Said 'Death Camp Fence' I Meant 'Deli Counter'
Again, Oprah is just a sucker for a wildly implausible story about the damn Holocaust. All the way back in 1996, Herman and his lady had a gushy segment on Oprah's show, and their tale was deemed "the greatest love story ever told." Trouble is, the romance at the heart of Rosenblat's story (which was turned into the now-canceled memoir Angel at the Fence)—about a young man in a concentration camp who was thrown an apple a day (to keep Dr. Mengele away) by a young woman across the fence; later they met in Brooklyn and fell in love—turns out to be completely fake, and everyone's sad because why would these nice old people lie? And about something so terrible. Ah well. Oprah hasn't spoken out yet, but when she does... Oh lord help us. She has been jilted one too many times, this book-loving Patron Saint of Sad, Lonely, and/or Awful People.

His statement, via the Times:

To all who supported and believed in me and this story, I am sorry for all I have caused to you and every one else in the world.

Why did I do that and write the story with the girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world.

Producer Harris Salomon said he was going forward with his film based on Rosenblat's book, simply labeling it fiction and donating all proceeds to Holocaust survivor charities. Meh, we'll see how long that plan lasts. Good luck keeping the investors together.

Rosenblats' son knew all along, according to the New Republic, the first publication to write about the fabrications:

Ken told me by phone that he had in fact known of his parents' lie for many years but hadn't been able to stop them. "My father is a man who I don’t know. I can’t understand it. It’s not my way of thinking," Ken said. "I didn’t agree with it. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I tried to just stay away from it. It was always hurtful. I just never dealt with it."

The publisher of the book is a unit of Penguin, the same company that put out Margaret Sletzer's fake autobiography. The company went ahead with this one even though the ghostwriter thought at least one anecdote in the story was "far fetched," as she told the Times, and even though another Holocaust memoir was found fabricated just this year.

Even Motoko Rich is getting a little bitchy about this lapse. With Joseph Berger, she wrote in the Times article:

That so many would get taken in by Mr. Rosenblat’s inauthentic love story seems incredible given the number of fake memoirs that have come to light in the last few years... This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.

More to the point, an increasing number of book buyers are just going to assume that the label "nonfiction" is meaningless, which is a fairly rational way of reacting to these scandals.

One of the remaining questions: Was Rosenblat's wife in on the deception? She appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show with him, but it's possible she was taken in: Rosenblat said he reunited with her after she told him she had hurled apples to a boy over a concentration camp fence. Rosenblat claimed he was that boy.

Excerpts:

Scene-by-scene commentary: [Media Assassin]

Full video:

Mr. Khan continued to follow their careers in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and his reading selections — along with the awareness of his formerly pampered lifestyle — made him a target of other prisoners and also guards.

“I was given the worst things to do, like scrubbing the toilets,” he said, “even though I was capable of helping G.E.D. students.”

Khan was deported to Trinidad at the end of his stint, with $10 to his name. An old friend eventually ran into him and ended up giving him $20,000 to get to Dubai. Now he "has been accepted into the society of wealthy expatriates and Saudi royalty" and is even designing his own jewelry line.

Dubai, Khan told the Times, is "a new Australia." Paging Margaret Seltzer...

[Times]

Inside the book, in small type, they placed a small, incomplete disclaimer that contradicted the labeling on the dust jacket. Free Press and William Morrow are shamelessly stripping the label "non-fiction" of all meaning, at least when they're the ones affixing it. That sort of institutionalized lying is far more pernicious than the freelance deception Frey and Seltzer engaged in.

The Boston Globe dug deep into Mezrich's book, about blackjack-playing MIT students, on Sunday.

Mezrich openly admitted that five of the six main characters from House are not real at all but amalgams of two decades worth of blackjack teams. And who knows whether to trust him even on that, given that he appears to have outright invented other book elements.

The one character in Mezrich's book who is not a composite, the team leader, is portrayed teaching at MIT, which he never did.

The blackjack players in Bringing Down The House smuggle large amounts of cash through airport security using "fake umbrellas and laptop computers, plaster casts and hollow crutches" and eventually by strapping it to their bodies, according to the Globe. But the blackjack team leader said he has never even heard of those techniques, much less used them.

A blue-eyed security guy following the blackjack team supposedly beats one player up in a casino bathroom, but none of the MIT blackjack players contacted by the Globe remembered such a thing happening, or such a security guy.

The best part of the Globe story is easily the weasely quotes from the author and his editors. Here's Mezrich:

"I took literary license to make it readable... The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it's true."

That sounds familiar.

The editorial director of Bringing Down The House's publisher, Free Press, said fabrication was neccesary to protect some players' anonymity. "There was an obvious need for privacy of some of the people involved," he told the Globe.

The editorial director seemed caught off guard that his author had stretched the truth for narrative purposes — he said that sort of thing is not OK. But he must have known he was marketing as "real-life" biography a work of fabrications, since his company included the disclaimer above.

Mezrich's new publisher, William Morrow, is even more brazen. The company is marketing supposed nonfiction from Mezrich that includes, buried at the end of the author's note, a disclaimer "that warns readers about changed names, compressed time periods, and altered identities and backgrounds. Certain characters, it goes on, 'are not meant to portray particular people.'"

Mauro DiPreta, the book's editor at William Morrow, says the disclaimer was inserted simply "to let the reader know what to expect in the book." What Mezrich does, he argues, is clearly nonfiction. "Sometimes reality is messy," he says. "I think it can be fine to streamline a story for narrative purposes."

Not everyone is happy that the idea of true nonfiction is being destroyed before our very eyes. Narrative non-fiction pioneer Gay Talese and WW Norton editor Robert Weil are quoted rebuking the practice.

But everyone actually involved with producing and potentially profiting from Mezrich's projects seems quite comfortable labeling fiction as nonfiction. They get to potentially profit from deals for movies like 21, and all they have to do is define truth the way one of Mezrich's characters does at the end of the Globe story:

"It's 90 percent true if you count things that happened to anyone," he says. "It's only about half true if you define it as actual things happening to the actual people they happened to."

[Globe]

By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men.

...Maybe the topics that have seized professional historians’ attention—family history, social history, women’s history, cultural history, "microhistory"—constitute nothing more than an attempt to take back territory they forfeited to novelists in the eighteenth century. If so, historians have reclaimed from novelists nearly everything except the license to invent . . . and women readers. Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women.

Is “history at risk”? If women barely read it at all, and if men mostly read books with titles like “Guts and Guns,” it just might be.

The most frustrating thing about the New Yorker essay is that author Jill Lepore, who apparently is a Harvard professor of history, never once stops to examine the function of her profession, despite all her questions.

It is hardly original or controversial (or male, really) to observe that the noblest and most important goal of history is to learn from the mistakes of the past and thus avoid repeating them.

The next time there's a genocide, I hope it is the "historical truth" historians who get to the scene first, because it's going to be a lot harder to refute the inevitable genocide deniers with a historian who dabbles in "fictional truth."

When the U.S. Congress debates the federal budget in the next cycle, I likewise hope the discussion is informed by studies of past deficits and tax schemes conducted by historians with some allegiance to the idea of objective accuracy instead of to insanity like "a reader can find the same truth in a history book and a novel."

And, yes, the next time there's a discussion on how to combat urban poverty and inner-city crime, I'm glad no one will be holding up Margaret Seltzer's "memoir" as an example of anything, despite the heavy-handed political ideology the author bandied about before she was caught.

If many women aren't buying history in the strict sense, the solution is not to change the definition of history or standards of historic study, it's to convince more girls and women there's a point in preparing for a time when they have a good deal of power and need to use it wisely.

I will now conclude this stern and dry and probably boring rant and return to my attempts to entertain with blog posts based on information of often uncertain accuracy, since I am not a professor of history at Harvard University.

New Yorker: A Critic at Large / Just the Facts, Ma’Am / Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history

The weekend before last, [Seltzer's agent] Faye [Bender] called me. She said, "Inga, I need you to sit down." This is when I found out that Peggy's entire life for the past decade is a lie. This elaborately constructed life/lie was in place long, long before Peggy ever gave me her writing. As far as I know, her daughter and baby-daddy also believe this life/lie.

Faye asked me if I would speak to a New York Times reporter. I agreed. Big mistake. Now my name was associated with a highly seasoned pathological liar. Worse, two anecdotes from Peggy's life/lie made it into Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil.

Davies had been accused of deceptive writing in 2004 by the Financial Times, Women's Wear Daily reported. In 2005, she was fired from her own paper, the Times of London, over shady expense reports. Also? She had a tattoo on her forehead that said "Liar, no book deals." (In case McGrath happens to be reading this, I should note that last sentence was a fabrication.)

The scandal broke in mid-March 2006. Scribner nixed the book deal by March 30. On April 18, one month and one day after Women's Wear Daily published its investigation, complete with comparisons to James Frey's fake memoir, Publisher's Weekly reported McGrath was parting with Scribner and accepting a new job at Riverhead — Seltzer contract in tow, it turned out.

"McGrath is credited with editing an array of high profile writers including Maile Meloy, Eric Puchner and Chip Kidd," the trade wrote.

Judging from a 2000 rejection letter, first published by Literary Rejections On Display, McGrath assembled her stable of "high-profile" writers by keeping her expectations high; in the letter she said she was hunting for manuscripts that "blow me away." McGrath hardly softened the rejection when she mentioned, right there in the first paragraph, another, implicitly better writer of hers, Erika Krouse, who "I am publishing this spring," unlike the rejection recipient.

If nothing else, the document is a reminder of the competitive pressures that help drive some authors to start plagiarizing and making things up:

[Publisher's Weekly, First Post, Literary Rejections On Display]

To the newsroom staff:

Single-source profiles of people who are not already well known quantities are traps we have fallen into twice in the past year or two, and that's too often. Until publishers start fact-checking their own nonfiction books, and that'll be the day, we should remember that profiles of unknown authors should always include reporting from other sources — not just surrogates of the profilee like agents, publishers, lawyers, etc. — to verifiy the most important facts. But even when there's no book involved, the same rule applies. If we can't find ways to check key facts, names, graduation claims, etc., we should hold the story until we can verify them, and if we can't, we should be suspicious. Live and learn....

Craig

[Tabloid Baby]

Though ostensibly a South Central Blood, "Chatman" often sounds like he's writing a vulgar, awkwardly-phrased college term paper on power relations within the drug trade.

"Just the same as countries like Colombia and Afghanistan stake the greater benefits of their economy in the drug trade," Chatman wrote, "all these foreign drugs find their way to the streets of Los Angeles, where the impoverished and the gangs stake their economical benefits in the same trade."

"The gangs, the impoverished, the distributors, processors, traffickers, merchants, and consumers work in the streets day to day. Militias protect the interest of poppy fields of Afghanistan and Coca plantations of Colombia just the same as gang members protect their common interest and profits with AK 47’s, small armies and control of enough area to assure that all profitable substances will be sold on time."

Chatman also said he joined the Bloods at age eight, dropped out of high school, learned to make crack from his father and, uh, identifies as part of Generation X.

Also? He's a big fan of Margaret Seltzer! Referring to Seltzer by her pen name Margaret Jones, Chatman wrote:

Margaret Jones is one of those who was fit to survive the 3rd world conditions of Los Angeles. Every moment of trauma and oppression within her life she overcame with successful accomplishments and great.

...Margaret Jones is a product of the hood. She has seen her share of desensitizing events and hardships, enough to be a soldier in the fight against poverty, oppression and ignorance. She continued to fight her way through the University of Oregon where she graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Ethnic Studies, but she began her fight in South Central LA, below the Hollywood sign.

Since the site is destined to be taken down sooner or later, screenshots of the Chatman biography and "Foundation Information" page follow.

NPR bit:

From WBUR, Seltzer is a little too defensive about how many kids she shared her South Central LA foster home with:

Also from WBUR, Seltzer protects her ruse as she so often does, by shifting the conversation from the specifics of her life to broader social issues. (Incidentally, this story was clearly recycled for the NPR clip above, nearly verbatim, but that tactic is hardly uncommon among authors on book tours.)