Readers of newspapers and magazines, watchers of TV, anyone tuned in to the twenty-first century may decide that it’s hard to believe anything or anybody these days. It’s not just the revelations of the secret sex lives of public figures. I care more about the rather frequent book scandals: those memoirs that turn out to be not memoirs at all, but mainly fiction. What’s going on, anyway?

One of the most recent examples involved “Margaret B. Jones” (Margaret Seltzer), whose “memoir,” Love and Consequences, claimed that she grew up in an African-American foster family in a poor neighborhood of Los Angeles, is half Native American, ran guns for gangs, and had a brother shot in gang warfare.

It turns out that Seltzer grew up in an all-white family in wealthy Sherman Oaks and attended a private school. Her sister revealed the truth. The author’s excuse? She had something important to say, and “there was no other way someone would listen to it.”

“Misha Defonseca,” actually Monique De Wael, in her “Mischa: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” claimed to have traveled 2,000 miles across Europe as a young girl searching for her departed parents. She claimed that she stabbed a Nazi soldier after watching him rape a young girl, spent time in the Warsaw ghetto, and was adopted by wolves.

It turns out that it just didn’t happen, and De Wael is not even Jewish, as her book claims. Her parents were killed by the Nazis, but she lived with her uncle and grandfather in Brussels. She was baptized Roman Catholic, but she says, “I felt Jewish.”

I haven’t read either book (actually, both of them sound very interesting), but I first encountered this kind of deception after I’d read James Frye’s intriguing A Million Little Pieces two years ago. I loved the book, and took it at face value as a personal recovery story.

My dentist was the first to clue me in when he doubted Frye’s story of extreme dental work without anesthesia (not allowed for drug addicts). Then came the general outing and Oprah’s outrage.

Why did Seltzer, De Wael, and Frye, all excellent story tellers, resort to total or partial fabrication and make what should have been novels (fiction) into memoirs?

The quick and easy answer is to make money. We live in an age of sensationalism, where many people demand “truth” rather than “fiction.” Truthful, unexciting memoirs of ordinary people (like mine) are never best sellers, but fiction often has a ho-hum quality too.

The search for new thrills seems to demand a combination of an exciting life story and a real person why can impress the talk show audiences and rake in tons of money in book sales.
Fiction has its star authors too, but it’s difficult for a newcomer to get discovered. Somehow, a fabulous story disguised as fact has more appeal.

There may be more to it than money. Susan Shapiro Barash, author of Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie, writes that some people “come to believe their own lies. It’s wishful thinking. They have chosen to lie to themselves. And in our culture, there’s a pressure on people to succeed and get ahead the best they can.”

And what about the publishers? Of course they’re in business to make money. According to Michael Kinsley in Time (March 17, 2008), “They don’t seem to turn on their baloney detectors when they sit down to read a manuscript.”

Perhaps, as Kinsley says, “The temptation to embroider an anecdote is nearly universal.” Still, I believe in truth and honesty. Write those books, Margaret, Monique, and James, but call them fiction. I’ll still read them.

I believe in fiction, the category to which these three books belong. Does it really matter that all the vivid incidents described in these books never happened, or never happened to the authors themselves? Our imaginations, like those of the authors, tell us that most of them could have happened. Still, author dishonesty is hard to accept. We don’t like to be fooled.

What do you think? Please leave your comments.