Week 7 Prompt: Hoax Memoirs

Prompt:
For our prompt this week, I want you to think about fake memoirs, author mills (James Patterson), and celebrity inspired book clubs. Basically write a readers' response to one of the articles you are reading for this week (see syllabus or links in this post for readings) - or talk about a time when a book or author that made headlines affected you personally or your work.

Article Referenced:

Somers, J. (2017, December 18). 5 Hoax Memoirs Still Worth Reading.  B&N Reads. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/5-hoax-memoirs-still-worth-reading/

The hoax memoir is a topic of interest for me after a discussion that my book club had last year.  We read the memoir Maid by Stephanie Land and it led to one of the most thought-provoking discussions that our group has had to date.  Several members of our book club felt after reading the book that Land was an unreliable narrator given how many people in her life seemed to disagree with her perspective on various situations throughout the book. I didn’t share that same interpretation, but instead thought Land was a person who had made a series of bad decisions at a relatively young age then felt she didn’t deserve better because of her past mistakes and thus would sabotage any chances she had of making her life better. 

After reading about the hoax memoirs featured in our assignment this week, I reflected back on the discussion about Maid and how it might compare to the hoax memoirs outlined.  I especially looked at the parallels between Maid and A Million Little Pieces.  Assuming my fellow book club members were right and that Land embellished her story in a similar way that Frey did by exaggerating the most important details in her story, there is a still a great narrative to tell about the difficulty of raising oneself up out of poverty.  The stories in Land’s book detail the difficulties of obtaining government assistance when you’re a single parent in a low-paying job and the traps people fall into as they try to become self-sufficient.  As someone who has worked adjacent to many social service agencies helping people such as Land, I know the truths in her story and recognized that she suffered many of the struggles common to individuals working with social service agencies around me.  Much like Frey’s story, it seems there is a lot of valuable perspective to be found in Land’s story even if some of the story may have been fabricated to sell books.

Thinking about the decision to publish Land’s story from a pragmatic view, how does a publisher verify the account of a story when dealing with perspectives rather than facts?  Land’s story is primarily her own recollections which of course are tainted by her own perceptions of people and events. 

Given the nature of memoirs, I think all readers would be best served by approaching the genre in general as the author’s interpretation of how events unfolded and not as a piece of journalism.  Each of our memories has faults in it, and thus any story told based on our memories is likely to have factual errors.   While publishers still should have the onus of verifying a story as much as possible prior to publication, the fact of the matter is that readers should use caution before taking any memoir at face value and should always remember that a memoir is but one version of a story.