Another fake memoir almost hits the press (from the NYT):
A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.
And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.
This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.
Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday night, after learning from Mr. Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Mr. Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in a sub-camp of Buchenwald with the help of his future wife, canceled the book and demanded that Mr. Rosenblat return his advance.
Now, both articles linked above touch on all that is wrong with this sort of thing, as well as ponder why it’s just so popular to make up a story about your life and claim it’s true; and I admit, while reading the article, the entire time I’m thinking, “what an asshole.” This bit, however, touched me in a strange way:
In a statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”
He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”
I get this. It makes me start to like the guy. It also made me wonder, “what the hell is wrong with fiction”? And that’s the thing. These faked memoirs are obviously compelling stories, or else publishers wouldn’t pick them up and people wouldn’t read them. Do people feel that their messages will somehow lose their oomph if presented as fiction sprinkled with occasional truth? It’s not like no one has ever written fiction with elements of true events before. If these are his dreams, why not write and present them as his dreams? As fiction. Storytelling can be an agent of change, regardless of the veracity of the events described. To paraphrase Einstein, often times the imagination is more important than knowledge.
I’d like to believe that Rosenblat, at least in the beginning, wasn’t motivated by profit, that he was motivated by a desire to do good. It’s saddening that his legacy is now tarnished because he had to present the story he wanted to tell as the truth. The best fiction, after all, revels in the fact that it is a lie.
I have been puzzling over this for years. I have asked over and over and never gotten a straight answer, or any answer at all really about what the factors are that differentiate fiction from non-fiction.
I finally had to conclude that there is no longer any such thing as non-fiction.
The lines between fiction and non-fiction are definitely blurred. My immediate response would be along the lines of “the movie you just watched is fiction and the review of it you just read is non-fiction,” but the English major in me can’t sit with that definition. So yeah, there’s yet another non-answer for you!
I’m going to think on it some more, though. It’s something I’d like to try to answer for myself as well. Might have to write a post on it.
That is so sad. I feel many were fooled because we want to believe in such wonderful feelings of love in society. Fiction is good, but when presented as “non fiction” that is where the problems come in
My guess? To write a good novel you have to actually be able to write, whereas to write a good memoir, you really just need to have a good story.
It’s easier to get a poorly-written compelling memoir published than it is to get a poorly-written compelling novel. At least, that’s my theory.
People don’t read fiction very much anymore. And more women read fiction than men. It may, in some circles, be considered a “girl thing” to read fiction. Publishers want to make max amount of money. Therefore they market it as a memoir, which more people will read. This is precisely why most movies and books are crap these days. It’s either lowest common denominatored to appeal to “everybody”, or heavily segregated acc. to demographics to appeal to “only” that demographic. That is no way to make art.
On the Road was originally submitted as non-fiction but Kerouac’s publisher refused to print it as such for fear of being sued by people in the book who were depicted engaged in “degenerate” acts. Supposedly all Kerouac did was change the names and it was then published as a novel.
A Fan’s Notes was perhaps more a blend of truth and reality (Exley openly discusses one story in the book and talks about all the different ways he told it over the years) but it to was clearly more memoir than novel. Again, the publisher insisted on printing it as fiction.
Which suggests much of what is going on has as much to do with legal issues and trends in readers tastes than anything else. Forty years ago A Million Little Pieces would have printed as fiction (or, more likely due to its stunningly bad prose not printed at all) as would Angel at the Fence. Yesterday publishers preferred fiction for a variety of reasons, today non-fiction.
Hollywood handles this better. A movie like Nixon/Frost comes out and they say it’s true but every review you read both rattles off all the historical inaccuracies and simultaneously critiquing it as its own work – in other words historical inaccuracies are seen as one part of the big picture – is it a good movie?
As bad as I think A Million Little Pieces is, I have no great heartburn over calling it non-fiction. Frey was a guy who dabbled in drugs and had a few minor run-ins with the law. The book blows all that out of proportion, but to paraphrase Hunter Thompson, if I want true non-fiction I’ll watch the closed circuit monitors in a department store.
And that’s the thing. These faked memoirs are obviously compelling stories, or else publishers wouldn’t pick them up and people wouldn’t read them.
In the cases of the faked memoirs that I’ve read about, I don’t think the faked stories were all that compelling. They were unbelievable as fiction, thus breaking the first rule of writing fiction, which is that it has to be more realistic than reality is.
Think about that for a second. We’ve all heard outrageous stories that we’d never believe if we didn’t trust the storyteller to be telling the truth, or if we hadn’t seen it happen personally. I’m talking about stories like the guy who sawed his own arm off when it was pinned by a boulder. The world is full of those stories, but they don’t make for good fictional storytelling, because they’re too unbelievable.
But take an outrageous story, slap a non-fiction tag on it, and it becomes, well, not more believable, but it lowers the expectations for the reader. Suddenly, someone is willing to accept a story about a white girl who grew up in a foster home in south-central LA and was a gangbanger before being saved by her ability to write. Try to write that as a novel, and you might get some interest from an after-school special, or The Babysitter’s Club, but not much else, because it’s only believable if it’s actually true. Otherwise, it’s an exercise in wish-fulfillment.