Newsletter sign-up: 
Get Breaking News on your cellSlate's "Fake Memoirist's Guide"
5:15 PM Thu, Mar 06, 2008 | Permalink
E-mail News tips
 |
 |
 
|
|
March 2008
Recent Posts
National Book Critics Circle awards Slate's "Fake Memoirist's Guide" Happy Birthday to us: Texas Pages turns 1 Laura Bush on her "greatest love affair" -- books Categories
dallasnews.com
Entertainment Blogs |
For those of you whose publishing dreams may have been dented, if not totally dashed, by the recent spate of memoirist "outings" -- the girl who supposedly lived with wolves during World War II, the girl who supposedly lived with gang members in South Central LA -- Christopher Beam over at Slate.com has come up with a wonderfully snarky "Fake Memoirist's Survival Guide: How to Embellish Your Life Story Without Getting Caught." For instance, he suggests: "Specificity is your enemy. Write with passionate vagueness. Avoid precise dates; don't get more exact than the year if you can help it. Better yet, the decade. ... When in doubt, go with 'awhile.' " Here's the entire piece. |
 | |
|
Spotlight
|
|
Comments
Posted by Mary E. DeMuth @ 8:12 AM Fri, Mar 07, 2008
Here's my take on this. Besides becoming a pathological liar, and creating your own persona, someone who fakes a memoir has to have some serious lack of community. Because people in community know each other and figure stuff out. Loners can hide and fabricate.
I finished my memoir (with Harper Collins). It's in the editing stages now. I took great pains to make sure everything is as I remembered it. Sure, it's hard with a memoir, especially as I'm mining memories thirty five years old. But thankfully, I've come to understand that my perspective of a memory may be different than a parent's same perspective. And that's okay. A five year old won't have the same take as an adult.
Even so, I did my best to write the memoir as raw and real as I could remember the memories.
Mary E. DeMuth
www.marydemuth.com