BOSTON. Following revelations that “Margaret B. Jones,” the author of an alleged memoir about her life as a half-Native American who had been raised by a black family, was actually Margaret Seltzer, a white woman who grew up with her wealthy biological family, the National Association of Memoirists today announced a project that would create a code of ethics for its members.
James Frey: “It was a lie, but it was a really good one.”
“It’s really annoying,” said Crystal Vere, an Aleutian Islander who was raised by turtles and survived the Civil War by eating grubs given to her by cross-dressing Union soldiers. “You work so hard to remember everything just as it was and get it down on paper, and then people write fictional memoirs that make all those lonely nights when you doubted yourself seem wasted.”
Misha Defonseca: “I wasn’t actually fed by wolves–I’m wearing them!”
The memoir genre has been rocked by a succession of frauds including Seltzer’s hoax “Love and Consequences,” James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” and Misha Defonseca’s “A Memoire of the Holocaust Years”, which claimed that she was aided by wolves as she walked on her hands through Europe during World War II. “It used to be we just moved them over to Fiction when we found out they weren’t true,” says Dylan Dansby, manager of Newton Booksmith, “but we need to reserve shelf space for works of real fiction, as opposed to fiction-based fact, or fact-based fiction.”
“We’re here for the book signing.”
Under the proposed guidelines, writers must submit the following required elements for prior review by a panel of registered memoirists: (a) the type of animal that raised you, (b) what parlor trick–juggling, magic, card tricks–you used to distract your Nazi tormentors, and (c) whether the drugs you took were prescription, over-the-counter, or recreational.
The New York Times has been suckered by all of the hoaxes, providing ammunition to the paper’s conservative critics. “They make up so much stuff on the news pages,” said Lowell Gordon of Americans for Truth in Journalism, “they should combine the Week in Review with the Book Review.”