Literary Hoaxes
Read about best-selling memoirs that were revealed to mix fact and fiction
by Mark Hughes, Liz Olson, and Beth Rowen
Greg Mortenson
Mortenson, author of the best-selling memoir Three Cups of Tea and hero to many throughout the world for building 140 schools for girls in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, was dealt a stunning fall from grace in April 2011 when a segment on 60 Minutes alleged that several of the key events detailed in his book were exaggerated or fabricated. Mortenson gained wide fame with the 2006 publication of Three Cups of Tea, which chronicled how he turned a failed attempt to climb K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, into a mission to educate girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In his memoir, Mortenson said he became lost, ill, and disoriented during the 1993 climb and was nursed back to health by villagers in Korphe, Pakistan, a remote, mountainous village. He vowed to return and build schools in the area. Steve Kroft, the CBS correspondent, reported on 60 Minutes that Mortenson was never lost and his first visit to Korphe wasn't until 1994. In an interview with the Bozeman Daily Chronicle after the 60 Minutes broadcast, Mortenson said, "The time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993."
Mortenson also said in the book that he was kidnapped and held for eight days by members of the Taliban. Kroft said instead that Mortenson was an honored guest of—and protected by—tribal leaders in a village in South Waziristan. In addition, 60 Minutes accused Mortenson of exaggerating the number of schools he built and using money donated to the Central Asia Institute, the nonprofit he established to fund the construction of the schools, to promote his books and as "his personal ATM." Despite Mortenson's tainted reputation, his work and effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot be denied and have undoubtedly improved the life and future of scores of young women in a region historically hostile to them.
Misha Defonseca
A Belgium writer has admitted that
her World War II era memoir is fantasy. In
the memoir, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, Misha
Defonseca (1937- ), also known as Monique De Wael, described the adventures
of a 4-year-old Jewish girl left alone during the Holocaust when the Nazis deported her parents for being
resistance fighters. In the story, the child killed a German soldier in
self-defense, escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto, was rescued by a pack of
wolves that then protected her from the Nazis, and traveled 1,900 miles
across Europe to find her parents.
None of it was true. A Belgium historian,
Maxime Steinberg, was researching the registry archive of Jewish families
from that period and discovered that there were no Jewish families by the
name of Defonseca or De Wael. In fact, Monique De Wael is not Jewish, she
was never in the Warsaw Ghetto, she did not kill a German soldier, and there
was not a pack of wolves. In a 2008 statement, she acknowledged that the
story was fantasy and that she never fled her home in Brussels to find her parents. The book,
Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, has been translated into
18 languages as well as being made into a French film called Survivre
avec les Loups (“Surviving With Wolves”).
James Frey
James
Frey acknowledged in 2006 that he had fabricated and embellished parts
of his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, a story of personal
redemption that sold about 3.5 million copies. His publisher, Doubleday,
justified Frey's liberties, saying the memoir is a subjective genre. The
controversy led to a discussion about the increasingly blurred line between
fact and fiction and the public's acceptance of altered reality as truth. Oprah Winfrey chose the memoir
as a selection in her book club and initially came to Frey's defense. She
later withdrew her support for him, saying she “felt duped.”
Margaret B. Jones
In 2008, Riverhead Books
published Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones—a memoir
based on her childhood as a half white, half Native American foster child who grew up running
drugs for the Bloods gang in South Los
Angeles. In her highly praised memoir, Jones describes her African-American foster mother, who raised
Margaret and four grandchildren, and a foster bother, who was shot and
killed by the Crips outside their home. In reality, Margaret B. Jones is
actually Margaret Seltzer, a white girl who was raised by biological parents
in the San Fernando Valley and graduated from a private high school in North
Hollywood. After seeing a photograph of Seltzer and her daughter in the New
York Times, Seltzer's older sister, Cynthia Hoffman, reported that Love
and Consequences was a fabricated story. Riverhead Books recalled all
copies of Love and Consequences and canceled the author's book
tour.
JT Leroy
Writer JT Leroy was exposed as a fake during the
winter. Leroy's critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical books, The
Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and Sarah, chronicled the
life of a repeatedly abused West Virginia teenager who travels to San
Francisco, becomes a prostitute and drug addict, and gets infected with HIV. Leroy's hardscrabble life and
redemption as a writer attracted the attention and affection of celebrities.
Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop, a couple from San Francisco, said they rescued the boy and
encouraged him to write. Leroy's agent, however, confirmed in 2006 that the
person who has claimed to be Leroy is actually Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey's
half sister. Many people believe that Albert created the Leroy character and
wrote the books and articles credited to Leroy.
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
