The Rise of "Liaries" - The Empty Profits of False Memoirs

I may have mentioned once or twice before that one of my favorite works of fiction purports to be a memoir. It is a dark and joyful work.

But it seems as if the publishing industry is interested in the awful opposite: fictional memoirs purported to be true.

The list of fake memoirs, or, as I like to call them, "liaries" grows every day:

James Frey, Mischa Defonesca, Ishmael Beah, Margaret Seltzer* have all published fabricated memoirs.

Every time new evidence comes out against a "memoir" so many commenters shake their heads and wonder why. **

It seems pretty plain to me. Liars lie, and buyers buy. I, for one, am swearing off memoirs until the publishing industry, en masse, works to re-establish my trust that they know how to check a fact or two.

No wonder people have such a hard time believing in the resurrection. The truth is a malleable commodity to our culture. I don't care how "betrayed" the editors of these books "feel." If they aren't cleaving heads and breaking bones, I'm unimpressed.

One memoir I would read is: Editor's Notes: How I Got Snookered by a Lying Author and Then Burned His House to the Ground.

Now, some criminal journalist has taken the conceit one step further: writing fictionalized memoirs of the recently dead. Esquire Magazine has applied their creative efforts to "imagine" and record, in first person, a diary of Heath Ledger's last days. I'm not linking to it, but it should be easy enough to find. Garbage usually is.

Hang them all.

*The Seltzer one is egregious. Everything in it, everything, is fiction.

**Some even try to continue to "support" the "underlying message" of the fake memoir. This is an impossibility for two reasons: a) a lie never has an underlying message and b) the concept is contradictory even if it could have an underlying message. Lies, even artfully crafted ones, cause people to believe in a counterfeit. Faith in a counterfeit is not measured as "good" faith, and, in fact, leads to a person's destruction. A liar with good intentions can destroy as many lives as a liar with bad ones.