I have no interest in commenting on the current book frauds. The blogosphere has both James Frey and JT Leroy covered.
However, I do want to out Christopher Moore.
Except he already outed himself:
I have to tell you, that James Frey’s admission yesterday that parts of his best-selling, Oprah-blessed biography, A Million Little Pieces, were made up, has cause me to do some soul searching of my own, and now I must confess, that although my books are marketed as fiction, and there are disclaimers all over the place to that effect, parts of them are totally true, factual, and not made up at all.
I haven’t called Oprah to break the news to her, but I have a call into her people, who assure me that my call will be answered in the order that it was received, and I really don’t mind listening to Maya Angelou reading the lyrics to The Girl From Ipanema while I’m on hold. (I love French Americans and I have been a fan of Miss Gelou’s work ever since she served as Surgeon General for the Clinton Administration.) Still, I can’t help but think that Oprah will be disappointed, and will, in fact, have to call Dr. Phil to console her. (“Phil, I was ignoring that motherfucker for other reasons altogether, now I find out that he hasn’t made all of that nonsense up. I’m distraught. Steadman make me a pie, bitch!”)
… and lots more of the funny at that post.
Of course the literary fraud is hardly a new thing, as an article yesterday at the CBC points out, listing ten of the best literary hoaxes of history.
I’ll quote a couple here to get you interested:
Scotland’s Homer
While Chatterton was fooling the Brits, a Scottish schoolmaster named James Macpherson produced “translations” of the Gaelic verse of third-century epic poet Ossian, whose stories of heroism and love wowed primitivists like Napoleon and Goethe. Though there were some early skeptics — Samuel Johnson among them — it took almost another century before the translations were proven to be fake.…
Go Ask Alice
This 1971 “actual diary” of a teenaged girl who died of a drug overdose was meant to be a cautionary tale for adolescents in the post-hippie era. In the late 1970s, however, its “editor,” Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth counsellor, admitted to writing it based on the stories of some of her students. Sparks has gone on to produce many other “actual diaries” about troubled adolescents, including Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager and Annie’s Baby: The Diary of an Anonymous Pregnant Teenager.
