The veracity of two more 'misery memoirs' has been called into question. Margaret Jones's Love and Consequences (Riverhead US) and Misha Defonseca's Surviving with Wolves (Piatkus) joined the ranks of Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and A Million Little Pieces in the last fortnight
The veracity of two more 'misery memoirs' has been called into question. Margaret Jones's Love and Consequences (Riverhead US) and Misha Defonseca's Surviving with Wolves (Piatkus) joined the ranks of Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and A Million Little Pieces in the last fortnight.
‘It’s starting to get a bit annoying,’ Australian Booksellers Association president Fiona Stager told us. ‘The first couple, you kind of think “Oh well, everyone makes mistakes” but now it makes you almost mistrust the whole survivor memoir genre.’
‘Publishers are going to have to start being a lot more rigorous ... As a bookseller, I find it embarrassing when I have to say to my customers “The book that moved you, the book that affected you, is made up.”
Full of gangs, drugs and guns, Love and Consequences recalls Jones’s childhood as a half white, half-Native American foster child raised by a black family in South-Central LA.
Less than a week after US publication, it was revealed that Jones is in fact Margaret Seltzer – who grew up with her affluent, white, biological family in the San Fernando Valley, attending a private school.
First published 11 years ago, Holocaust memoir Surviving with Wolves has been translated into 18 languages, made into a film and earned its Belgian author millions. It tells the story of a seven-year-old Jewish girl orphaned by the Nazis, who was adopted by wild wolves in a 3000 kilometre journey across Belgium, Germany and Poland.
Seventy-year-old Defonseca last week admitted that she was born and raised a Catholic and spent the war living with relatives.
The book’s French editor, Bernard Fixot, told French radio that ‘will pay a very heavy price for this … This was always a beautiful story, but now it is a novel. Obviously, it is cheating the readers to say it is a true story. The book's status has changed.’
This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker