people say she’s crazy…

Two New York Times stories about fabricated memoirs caught my eye today, this one about Misha Defonseca and this one about Margaret Seltzer.

Ms. Defonseca’s book, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was published in the 1990s and, according to the Times, translated into 18 languages and adapted into a film in France called “Surviving with Wolves” (her “Memoire” included chronicles her living with and being raised by wolves for a time, not to mention killing a Nazi soldier and, it would seem, walking across Europe). Ms. Seltzer’s book, Love and Consequences, which she published under the name Margaret P. Jones, was very well-received, and she was about to start her Penguin book tour when her sister saw her photo in the Times and called her publisher to say that the story she’d sold as a memoir, “about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods,” according to the Times, was completely untrue. She went to a private school and was raised by her white biological parents.

Both women apologized. Both women are ashamed and, interestingly, somewhat confused. Ms. Defonseca’s statement to the AP reads: “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost.” Ms. Seltzer gave a tearful interview to the Times and explained that she felt she was speaking for an unheard population in her book.

Isn’t it a little strange? Isn’t it a little terrible? Two highly-skilled writers chose to do something incredibly stupid that ruined their careers. When James Frey did this a few years back, I felt pretty strongly that it didn’t matter. His fabrications made for a really good read, so who cares if it’s true or not, because you can’t believe everything you read anyway, right? At the time I at least noted that as someone with no experience with drug addiction or rehabilitation, I probably wasn’t the person to approach about how Frey’s fictionalization of his experience made me feel. I blamed Frey’s lies on his ego, and, well, there isn’t much anybody can do about a man’s ego. But I’ve got a theory, as a woman and a writer, on these two women, Ms. Defanseco and Ms. Seltzer, that has more to do with confidence than ego.

When it comes to writing fiction, it’s cozy to write what you know, and it’s tempting to write what you think you know or what to know. If you think you know a tough subject, it’s tempting to tackle it without the research you need or without taking a step back and putting your ducks in a row. Both women had peripheral experiences with the harsh environs they threw their fictional selves into, which gave them that taste of the unthinkable lives they weren’t going to live. They heard voices and saw scenes that stuck in their heads. They thought they had to get close enough to create something empathic, something that meant being there, meant something more than just a story, meant a memior.

The empathy these authors felt for the characters, narrators or groups they created or claimed to have known made them write their fictions. But fiction that rests on dramatic or painful issues (like gang violence or the Holocaust) has to be more that just empathetic–it has to be brilliant. Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust treatments come to mind, as, in a different way, does Jeffrey Eugenides’ approach to teenage suicide. I think Defonseca and Seltzer were crippled by the weight of the stories they wanted to tell. I think they chose to stand inside their stories as a means to prop up and legitimize them. Sadly, the praise their books have received indicate that they are fine writers who likely could have turned out fiction as fiction and succeeded.

If Ms. Seltzer wanted to speak for girls in gangland, she could have gone deeper than the South Central Starbucks where she wrote her book. She could have told one of their real stories or attributed her fictional compilation to the women she based it on. She could have told their stories without exploiting them or driving her career into the ground. Ms. Defonseca did a disservice to writers and nonwriters who did survive seemingly impossible, inhumane conditions during the Holocaust by writing a fantasy and not labelling it accordingly.

*Next day update! I’m a few days late on this, but Slate has this great article about Ms. Defonseca’s book.

*THE BEST next day update: Penguin’s site has taken it down, but Gawker has these excerpts from an interview with Ms. Seltzer about her experiences in the ‘hood. Wow.

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And now, dear readers, it’s your turn: if you got to write an earth-shattering memoir that wasn’t actually constructed of your memories (or any actual events, for that matter), what would you write? I, for one, used to have this very vivid fantasy where [even] crazy[er] racist people took over my prep school and called an assembly to tell us how all the non-Christian, non-white kids were getting kicked out, and I stood up and proclaimed my FREEDOOOOOOOM! This was, of course, long before I saw Braveheart, so it didn’t sound quite like that, but you get the idea. I think this mostly stemmed from my parents telling me that if Pat Buchanan ever won an election, we would be in deep shit. But that’s a different story. Anyway, what horrible trials would you overcome in your “memoir?”