I'm all in a tizzy this morning. Our power was out and I had to pick the kid from school. I'm so off track. Anyway, some interesting things in the book world:
Contest: Girls Just Reading is giving away Change of Heart by Jodi Picault.
Please take Dewey's survey on a Spring Read-a-thon.
Estella's Revenge, March edition is now available.
Reviews on the film version of The Other Boleyn Girl: "tasteful, but unappetising" and "not recommended". Ouch.
The big book news this week is the number of people writing fake memoirs. It'
s becoming an epidemic! First, the author of Mischa: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, a story of a girl living with wolves (that might have been a give away) to escape Nazis, admitted she made the whole thing up. Then Margaret B Jones admits her memoir Love and Consequences was a fabrication. Does no one remember James Frey wriggling under the cold, dead stare of Oprah? Meghan O'Rourke, like myself, can't understand how publishers could miss the lies completely. You think something (wolves, maybe?) would have given them pause. This isn't new, of course, (think Grey Owl) but publishers have resources available to them and it wouldn't have been too hard to find out that Margaret B Jones had gone to a private school. Do publishers have to fact check every little thing? Maybe not, but I think they have to tread carefully when it comes to memoirs.Of course, Frey's A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard continued to be best sellers even though they were pure bologna and that's what counts. These books would probably rotted in the slush pile as run of the mill fiction, but toss the word 'memoir' on it and then everyone's interested. So, if you'd like to make bags of money Slate has some pointers on how to write your own fake memoir. Did I ever tell you about the time I was running drugs for Nazis while being chased by wolves and having dental surgery with no anesthesia?
The autobiography of Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan woman, who won the Nobel Peace Prize after her book launched her into the spotlight, is a fabrication as well. She described watching her brother be tortured and burned to death, her father killed, and her mother raped and killed. And it's all lies.
ReplyDeleteI probably won't be reading *memoirs* or even autobiographies anytime soon.
And to think that I visibly cringed during the whole dentist part of A Million Little Pieces. A hate fakers!
ReplyDeleteyour fake memoir sounds fascinating!
ReplyDeleteTrish- Yeah, I'm turned off memoirs for awhile too.
ReplyDeleteStephanie- And it never happened.
Lauren- Thanks. Look for it at a bookstore near you.
If Oprah had carefully read Frey's memoir, she wouldn't have been in a position to be embarrassed. He's a little too over the top. The things that got me were:
ReplyDelete1. the people at the rehab place were like the refs in pro wrestling...always looking away from the action just when it was at its most dramatic
2. Frey gets to that place Lily went to and bursts in just in time to save her from doing something unsavory to get drugs.
3. The putting his face in a glass of whiskey to see if he could take it was laughable.
I'm ashamed to say that I believed the dental stuff, though. Isn't it funny where one's BS detector will and won't? But I think Oprah was asleep.
while also walking and chewing gum at the same time? hehe
ReplyDelete