Q: Why would a major publishing house print a memoir without checking basic facts?
A: Intense competition to sell books.
News this week of the bogus biography of a woman who claimed to have run drugs for a Los Angeles gang as a kid is yet another reminder to publishers that non-fiction must be vetted and fact-checked. Magazines work to do it. Newspapers work to do it. Academicians do it.
The adage truth is stranger than fiction doesn’t apply here. Our hunger for real stories of courage and strength has produced a market (albeit small) for authors who advertise their work as truth – but cross the firewall into fiction.
The combination usually doesn’t end well.
The unfortunate line of cheats includes Janet Cooke and The Washington Post. A more recent example of a book forced to go sideways after much acclaim was A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. You can buy it on Amazon, but the high praise it once won is mostly gone.
Is truth stranger than fiction? Sometimes.
But fiction is usually more entertaining. Mark Twain may have said it best: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
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