More Literary Hoaxes
March 10, 2008 by Heather Goldsmith
Filed under Home & Living
Today I found this interesting article on memorable literary hoaxes. This one leads with another fake memoir about to be released, supposedly by a half white, half native girl raised in by an abusive mother. Just like last week’s exposed fake, Love and Consequences
My favourites are Go Ask Alice
Keep your diaries and journals real unless you label them as fiction.
Heather
Where’d you get your information on Go Ask Alice? I loved reading that book in high school and college.
Hi Laura,
According to the article:
“it was revealed to have been written by the book’s “editor,” Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth counselor who said she based it on the stories told by some of her students. Sparks has gone on to produce many other “actual diaries” about troubled adolescents, including “Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager” and “Annie’s Baby: The Diary of an Anonymous Pregnant Teenager.”
But when my daughter read this book a few years ago, her copy had notes about the book and this was revealed in the edition she had. I read it with interest as I enjoyed this book myself as a teen and my daughter and I had a great discussion over that fact. You just never know. Thanks for asking about this. I can’t help feeling a bit annoyed when this happens.
We begin to wonder what’s true and what isn’t, don’t we? Of course, when you write about your life, you may find you don’t recall incidents like others who experienced them with you. But these usually are minor things. If you fictionalize too much, you’ll be caught up on it sometime.
When I was taking a children’s writing workshop, we had to write about an incident in our childhood. The instructor liked mine but gave suggestions for making it more exciting. Since those details were fabricated, I was uncomfortable about writing it this way. So he suggested I make it a fiction story, incorporating the fact with fabrication. This turned out very well and sold to several children’s magazines and appeared in an anthology. (I retained the rights so I could sell reprint and anthology rights.) Fiction based upon fact can be fun to write, but it should be labeled as such.
Hi Mary Emma,
Thanks for responding. I have to agree that fiction loosely based on our lives is always so much better. I can’t see why these people can’t have said their stories were fiction, though. And how true is it that we remember things differently to other family memembers, but, yes they aren’t usually things like who our parents were or recalling if we were black or not. Lol. Thanks again for your comment.