THURSDAY'S MUSINGS

Status: On Vacation; exhausted from the past few days' ordeals

Doing: Writing this blog; surfing the net; answering e-mails

Watching: Nothing.

Listening to: Nothing.

Reading: Kushiel's Scion by Jacqueline Carey (Page 173)

TOPIC: WHEN IN DOUBT? FABRICATE!

It's very odd how my local paper picked up on something about people fabricating their life stories just to embellish things a bit more--in order to get picked up by a traditional publisher. What's even more scary is how these same houses we want to be published by do not even pick up on the fact that what they may have could be faked! (Much like Jame Frey's A Million Little Pieces.)

They don't do any checking of their sources to make sure that the material is what it says it is.

But they publish it anyway--because they believe in its authenticity and its ability to sell books to a sympathetic reading audience.

I thought about doing that too. You know...just make up a few things about my life as well.

For example?

Instead of living in a breadbox for an apartment (which has seen better days), I could say that I've been living in a lavish condominium in downtown Seattle and making a six-figure income as a telecom engineer for let's say...Quest.

On top of that, I am a gradudate of Havard (cum laud), raised by a rich and well-to-do family, and basically am a staunch supporter of George W. Bush himself.

And this, I could add in my own personal autobiography and have it published by some big name publisher in New York--and they would never know!

But...

It wouldn't be the truth. Much like these two incidences illustrate:

Boring life story? Don't worry, just create one that will sell

The book publishing industry, through its apparent refusal to hire fact checkers, has single-handedly changed the definition of "memoir." A memoir used to mean one's own personal story; one that couldn't happen to anyone else because it happened to the author. These days, however, it's good enough for an author to believe, or feel strongly, that it happened.

Last week, Riverhead Books, a unit of Penguin Group USA, published "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir. This week, the publisher is busy recalling all copies. The memoir, by Margaret B. Jones, is about her life as a half-white, half-Native American foster child growing up in South-Central Los Angeles, living among gangs and running drugs for the Bloods.

The memoir, three years in the writing, was immediately debunked by the author's sister after a profile of her appeared in the New York Times. Cyndi Hoffman identified the memoirist as her sister, Margaret Seltzer, who is white and grew up in a well-to-do Los Angeles suburb with her biological family and attended private school. Now of course Seltzer says she's sorry (but it was the only way to get the story out). Her editor, Sarah McGrath, says, "There's a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one."

"I've been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story has never changed. All the details have been the same," McGrath said. Well, what more proof do you need?

After the denouncement, McGrath called Seltzer "naïve." Perhaps that goes both ways. ("Hey, on the phone, and on paper, she really sounded like a former gang banger.")

The episode comes on the heels of the news that a Holocaust memoir, "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years," by Misha Defonseca, was also made up. Published is 1997, "Misha" is about a Jewish girl from Brussels who walked across Europe by herself during World War II and spent months living in the forest, sometimes among wolves. Before it was published, two historians warned the publisher that the work was fantasy.

Never mind.

It turns out Misha Defonseca is really Monique De Wael, orphaned daughter of two Catholic members of the Belgian resistance. Before Seltzer and De Wael, it was James Frey, making up details in his book, "A Million Little Pieces," his "memoir" of his drug addiction and recovery. The story of Misha, De Wael helpfully explained, "Is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving."

Whatever.

Apparently there's no cache in writing fiction anymore. But the absence of fact-checking doesn't turn fantasy into reality.

***

From the net

NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir about a mixed-raced girl growing up in a gang-ridden neighborhood of Los Angeles, is a fabrication and the 19,000 distributed copies of the book will be recalled, its publisher said on Tuesday.

Author Margaret B. Jones, is actually Margaret Seltzer, a white woman who grew up in Sherman Oaks in Southern California and attended a private Episcopal school, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

In a tearful telephone interview with the newspaper, Seltzer admitted she never ran drugs for a gang and never lived with a foster family as she had claimed in the book.

Riverhead Books, the imprint of Penguin Group that published the book, will offer refunds through booksellers to anyone who bought it, spokeswoman Marilyn Ducksworth said.

The incident is the latest black eye for the publishing business. Two years ago author James Frey admitted he had fabricated key parts of his drug and alcohol memoir "A Million Little Pieces," which was the top selling nonfiction book in the United States in 2005.

"The business of publishing is so difficult, so challenging, and so elusive at times that people will do anything," said Lee Gutkind, author of "Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction."

"You would think what happened with James Frey would wake up the publishing world," he added.

According to the Times, Seltzer, 33, also never graduated from the University of Oregon, as she claimed.

In a statement, Riverhead said that Seltzer had provided "a great deal of evidence to support her story," including photographs, letters, support from a former professor and from people who pretended to be her foster siblings.

Ducksworth said Seltzer's real sister had called the publisher to express concerns, after which the story fell apart. Riverhead is canceling Seltzer's planned book tour.

"When it became known that the author was misrepresenting her personal story we took it seriously, moved very quickly and attempted to corroborate new information we were presented with," Riverhead said in a statement.

***
Writer admits Holocaust book is not true

BOSTON - Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true.

She didn't live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn't trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She's not even Jewish.

Defonseca, a Belgian writer now living in Massachusetts, admitted through her lawyers this week that her best-selling book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was an elaborate fantasy she kept repeating, even as the book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.

"This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving," Defonseca said in a statement given by her lawyers to The Associated Press.

"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," the statement said.

Defonseca, 71, has an unlisted number in Dudley, about 50 miles southwest of Boston. Her husband, Maurice, told The Boston Globe on Thursday that she would not comment.

Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.

Her two Brussels-based lawyers said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical. In the statement, Defonseca said she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents.

Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters.

The statement said her parents were arrested when she was 4 and she was taken care of by her grandfather and uncle. She said she was poorly treated by her adopted family, called a "daughter of a traitor" because of her parents' role in the resistance, which she said led her to "feel Jewish."

She said there were moments when she "found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."

Pressure on the author to defend the accuracy of her book had grown in recent weeks, after the release of evidence found by Sharon Sergeant, a genealogical researcher in Waltham. Sergeant said she found clues in the unpublished U.S. version of the book, including Defonseca's maiden name "De Wael" — which was changed in the French version — and photos.

After a few months of research, she found Defonseca's Belgian baptismal certificate and school record, as well as information that showed her parents were members of the Belgian resistance.

"Each piece was plausible, but the difficulty was when you put it all together," Sergeant said.
Others also had doubts.

"I'm not an expert on relations between humans and wolves, but I am a specialist of the persecution of Jews, and they (Defonseca's family) can't be found in the archives," Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg told RTL television. "The De Wael family is not Jewish nor were they registered as Jewish."

Defonseca's attorneys, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, contacted the author last weekend to show her evidence published in the Belgian daily Le Soir, which also questioned her story.

"We gave her this information and it was very difficult. She was confronted with a reality that is different from what she has been living for 70 years," Nathalie Uyttendaele said.

Defonseca's admission is just the latest controversy surrounding her 1997 book, which also spawned a multimillion dollar legal battle between the woman, her co-author and the book's U.S. publisher.

Defonseca had been asked to write the book by publisher Jane Daniel in the 1990s, after Daniel heard the writer tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue.

Daniel and Defonseca fell out over profits received from the best-selling book, which led to a lawsuit. In 2005, a Boston court ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer Vera Lee $22.5 million. Defonseca's lawyers said Daniel has not yet paid the court-ordered sum.

Daniel said Friday she felt vindicated by Defonseca's admission and would try to get the judgment overturned. She said she could not fully research Defonseca's story before it was published because the woman claimed she did not know her parents' names, her birthday or where she was born.

"There was nothing to go on to research," she said.

Lee, of Newton, muttered "Oh my God" when told Defonseca made up her childhood and was not Jewish. She said she always believed the stories the woman told her as they prepared to write the book, and no research she did gave her a reason not to.

"She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case," Lee said. "I was just totally bowled over by the news."

***

Often, it is too late for the publisher to do anything about it. But the question still: Why didn't they bother catching it in the first place?

This is just another clear example of the pitfalls in traditional publishing. Tread carefully when dealing with your publisher. Make sure what you've written is yours and not some fantastic yarn about a "pre-supposed" life which never existed.

Because defrauding the public and the industry comes with a not-so-nice consolation prize in the end.