Just skimmed through this on my mate Yemisi Blake’s blog. He’s busy getting his degree right now so didn’t have time to post on this subject so I thought I’d add in my tuppence ha’penny’s worth. The basic story is this: white girl writes and passes off memoir as a mixed-race Native American girl who was a drug runner for LA gang the Bloods, gets published by Penguin, exposed; book and tour are subsequently cancelled and she will never eat lunch in this town again.
I just read William Boyd’s Any Human Heart: an excellent fake memoir cunningly disguised as an excellent novel. Which begs the question, why bother to fake a memoir when you could write a perfectly good novel? Or even just straight non-fiction? There’s a back against the wall interview with her yakking on about providing a voice for the disenfranchised and raising the issue in the public eye. The word ‘bollocks’ springs, energetically, to mind.
Truth versus fiction comes up a lot in poetry: where the boundaries are intrinsically blurred. Bad cop [tor]mentor would always say ‘yeah, so what if it’s true? It’s the truth of the poem that counts, not whether that incident “actually happened”.’ Yes. I couldn’t agree more. Fact is often stranger than fiction, and if it doesn’t ring true then lie. On the page. But it is the betrayal of personal trust – between author and reader, author and editor, author and subject – that smarts. It hurts when people lie to us and you can tell that her editor, who worked closely with her for three years, really feels the sting.
Yet, there is something in us that likes the ‘based on a shocking true story’ factor. It is the inner desire for narrative ‘truth’ that created the urban myth: ‘it REALLY happened – no word of a lie, mate’. And perhaps the voracious public appetite for grizzled, car crash memoir a la Pelzer et al and its fairground mirror image that is the Britney/Amy/Pete media frenzy. That and the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else fuck up/get fucked.
Whatever, the fact is this stuff sells: far far more than your average non-fiction social tract where a first timer would probably count themselves lucky to see a $5000 advance rather than the infintely more palatable ‘under $100,000′ figure that the article quotes. Her bankability as a ‘marketable’ author rockets through the roof if the tales of guns and gang banging are true, far more ‘meeja fodder’ n’est pas?’ And let’s face it, would she have been able to convince an agent and editor that a middle class white girl from a ‘nice’ school on the right side of tracks could write about the ‘hood’ with any authority however clever the prose? Far easier just to go the whole hog.
Having just discovered that the ‘going rate’ for ad hoc online content is apparently two and a half pence per word there’s part of me that thinks ‘I can’t say I blame her’. These are hard times for writers hoping to bag a crust from the pen. Even Dickens was paid a penny a word! and a penny went a lot further in 1870. No ‘100 Ways to Get Good at Golf’ is hardly Great Expectations. But let’s face it, at least everybody knows that nothing you read on the internet is TRUE.
PS. do click through on that last link: it is my new favourite waste of time.
