Faux Celebrity Memoirs – Week 7 Prompt

In all my years as a reader, I’d never given much thought to so called ‘fake’ or ‘faux’ celebrity memoirs, or faux memoirs in general. I haven’t been much of a non-fiction reader in the past though, so I found this compelling that someone would go so far out of their way to write about a life they never lived. Or put such an exaggerated spin on their actual lives for the purpose of profiting off of it. I know there are people out there who do that, but it never occurred to me that there were books written about it.

One of the best examples of this is James Frey’s 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces which made it to the top of Oprah’s Book Club list, which in turn then made it onto the best seller’s list. Frey wrote about his life as an addict and his time in an drug and alcohol treatment facility, and what he experienced during detox and withdrawal. He also shares about the patients he meets who are as troubled as he is, who become his friends and confidants, his advisors. It’s described as being ‘the fight between one young man’s will and the ever-tempting chemical trip to oblivion, and the fight to survive on his own terms for reasons close to his heart’ (Barnes and Noble).

Frey is identical to the narrator in that he’s writing and narrating his own life, but what is disappointing is that the majority of his story is not true. In 2006, an investigative website called The Smoking Gun released an expose on Frey’s book, citing numerous exaggerations and false information in his account of his life’s story. “I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require,” he stated in a later interview that same year with Oprah.

Louis Menand (2018) said it best in his article Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship: What Happens When We Found Out Writers Aren’t Who They Said They Were:

“When people had an issue with the author, it’s because they felt he or she had violated what is known in narratology as the ‘autobiographical pact’ or the understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the ‘I’ of the text.”

According to an article in Ethics Unwrapped, authors and literary critics noted that memoirs are not necessarily the same genre as biographies or autobiographies. Author Joyce Carol Oates stated that “the tradition of personal memoir has always been highly ‘fictionalized’ – colored with an individual’s own emotional truth… this is an ethical issue with convincing arguments on both sides.”

Unfortunately, this now leads us to question not only the ethical standards of truth in general when it comes to nonfiction, but other things such as writers who write under a pen name, ghostwriters, forgery, plagiarism, etc. in the literary world.

Personally, I don’t have an issue with an author using a pen name or other pseudonym. I know many authors write under different names for a variety of reasons, such as if they’re writing different genres, or if they happen to be women or vice versa. Did you know that Viola Shipman is actually a pen name for Wade Rouse? According to ‘her’ biography, Rouse chose to use his grandmother’s name to honor the woman who inspired his works of fiction.  

What I do have an issue with, and something that I will be looking at more carefully when it comes to my reading, especially of the non-fiction variety, is whether or not what the authors are writing are 1) written by the actual person, 2) did what they write actually happen, and 3) if the person writing the memoir isn’t the actual person, are the facts still true?

Other faux memoirs include:

• -           Go Ask Alice
• -          The Education of Little Tree
• -          Misha: A Memoire of the HolocaustYears
• -          Catch Me If You Can
• -          The Awful Disclosures
• -          Papillon
• -          The Hand That Signed the Paper
• -          Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound witha Minor League Misfi  

References

Menand, L. (2018). Literary hoaxes and ethics of authorships: What happens when we find out writers aren’t who they said they were. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/literary-hoaxes-and-the-ethics-of-authorship

Roos, D. (2022). 5 memoirs that were too good to be true. How Stuff Works. https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/literature/fake-memoirs.htm

Somers, J. (2017). 5 hoax memoirs still worth reading. B&N Reads Blog. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/5-hoax-memoirs-still-worth-reading/

University of Texas: McCombs School of Business. (24 February 2023). A million little pieces: Case study. Ethics Unwrapped. https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/million-little-pieces

Winfrey, O. [OWN]. (29 August 2012). #18: Oprah confronts James Frey – TV Guide’s Top 25 – Oprah Winfrey Network. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewC-KIe5qng&t=14s