The embellishments in best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces have led to a mini-scandal, coming to the fore even on network news broadcasts. Slate’s Seth Moonk argues why the hoax matters, even if in playing up the addiction issues he finds the literary ones uninteresting.
For my part, I’ve been more fascinated by the revelation that JT Leroy was a hoax, an actress playing the front for a literary persona. When I first encountered Leroy, in a Vanity Fair spread, I knew something was fishy. The "effiminate man" was clearly a woman, not an MTF either, and the descriptions of Leroy’s androgynous character were too coy to suggest anything other than his real identity as a woman. So when someone asked Sunday if they heard the news of JT Leroy, a couple of us replied "What? He’s a hoax, isn’t he?" I’ve not actually read Leroy’s work, but my main question is why every impacted party - Vanity Fair, Gus Van Sant, the New York Times played along. Did they know? How could they not? I can imagine individual people, like Winona Ryder, thinking it fun to be in on a gag, but shouldn’t newspaper and magazine editors be held to a higher standard?
I’m in the minority who think that the veracity of nonfiction, memoir and autobiography does matter and should be policed. At the very least, it would be nice if the publishers’ refrains of "we stand by author" meant something other than "our author made money for us."
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