Literary fraud du jour or why couldn't she have just written a novel?

Most publishers are honorable... but not all editors, and not when professional reputations are at stake, and not when books have to earn back six figure advances. The vast majority of published books aren't fact checked by the publisher, and most publishers could care less. They just want it to sell. And earlier I was speaking of autobiographies written by the individual, rather than the ghostwriter - nothing wrong with them, but they're just not . . . real.

 

Holy shit.
You're kidding, right?
The woman who was banging Bernie Kerik in the 9/11 rescue workers' hospice apartment? The grand philosophe behind books by Stern, Limbaugh, and Matt Freaking Drudge.
I take it back.
Protozoa are insulted by the comparison.

 

Don't mind Mizzou, Fen. He's just regurgitating what The Big Lead probably told him.

 

Here's a follow up story in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/books/05fake.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that released the book, by Margaret Seltzer, under a pseudonym, Margaret B. Jones, said on Tuesday that there was nothing else that he or Sarah McGrath, the book’s editor, could have done to prevent the author from lying.

“In hindsight we can second-guess all day things we could have looked for or found,” Mr. Kloske said. “The fact is that the author went to extraordinary lengths: she provided people who acted as her foster siblings. There was a professor who vouched for her work, and a writer who had written about her that seemed to corroborate her story.” He added that Ms. Seltzer had signed a contract in which she had legally promised to tell the truth. “The one thing we wish,” Mr. Kloske said, “is that the author had told us the truth.”

There is only so much due diligence a book publisher can do in a book of memoirs or an autobiography. There is a presumed--not to mention contractual--level of trust between an author and their editor.

 

Whatever happended to Janet Cooke?
Anyone know?

 

Is that pronounced 'leed' or 'led'?

 

She's completely dropped out of sight. A 1996 GQ article written by her former boyfriend and Post colleague indicated she was working for minimum wage at a retail store in Michigan.

 

That was most recent thing I could find as well. Damn! Near-Pulitzer Prize to minimum wage at K-Mart.

 

Here's the thing that always gets me about these fabrication cases: I see excerpts or summaries and think "who the hell actually fell for this?"

She claimed she was a half-white, half-Indian girl who, while trafficking drugs at 13, spent her very first drug money to buy a burial plot? Really, someone swallowed that?

James Frey's "memoir" was the swaggering macho fantasy of an imbecile, with seemingly no relation to any reality.

And that other recent case floored me: a woman claimed her parents were killed in the Holocaust so she was raised by wolves? And I'm supposed to be surprised that she made it up? She was raised by fucking WOLVES and wrote a book about it, and no one questions it?

Either the publishers are (a) carefully avoiding checking out the story so they can claim innocence or (b) they are the dumbest, most naive people on the planet.

 

I honestly do not understand why a "memoir" is more marketable than a fiction that has some autobiographical material.
Chuck Barris had it right.

 

Some publishers and editors ARE some of the dumbest most naive people on the planet - quite a few I've met and worked with - and that's plenty - have zero connection to the real world. Many come straight down from "the life of privilege" track, and working in publishing is as a much as pasttime as anything else, a way to kill time between stints at the family summer house. The bulk of their life experiences come from books, so they seek out experiences in books that are titillating and thrilling, those that allow themselves to slip into another life, one which strikes a chord in their internal fantasy about places and things taboo to their upbringing which they imagaine are more exciting and authentic than their own very limited experiences.

They're also smart enough to avoid checking out the story to claim innocence. If you read the follow-up above, their vetting of the story was based on 1) Meeting two or more people who were introduced as foster siblings (probably a handshake in passing, but no interview or vetting, because that would have been mentioned, and if I had to, I could scrape up someone willing to act as my foster brother in about 15 seconds), 2) a professor who vouched for her work (I believe he recommended her to an agent, but again, nothing about fact-checking - the prof read her work and liked it, period), and 3) a writer who had written about her (well gee, that's solid evidence - I've been profiled myself about a half dozen times and no oin has even bothered to do it in person - I could have said I live my life attached to an iron lung and no one would have been wiser). That's all they could come up with folks, and they gave out a six-figure contract. Think you'd get a bank loan for that much with this much documentation?

Now some publishers and editors aren't like that, and some are really terrific, but damn few. The tragedy of it all is that faked books like this make it harder for real authentic work to get published, which harms us all, and causes people like me to question the authenticity of an entire genre.