Frank McCourt Passes Away

Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, as well as New York City school teracher of almost thirty years, passed away yesterday from cancer at the age of 78.

McCourt had been treated for melanoma but then became seriously ill with meningitis. He died at a hospice in New York City, according to his brother Malachy.

McCourt considered himself to be a late bloomer in the publishing world. Angela's Ashes was published in 1996 when McCourt was 66.

Don't Misunderestimate Me

We knew that this moment was coming. It was only a matter of time. Former president George W. Bush is working on a book. However, it won't be a traditional memoir, but rather a telling of twelve difficult decisions (both political and personal) that he had to make in his life. The book, tentatively titled Decision Points, is scheduled to be published in 2010 by Crown Publishing.

Well, at least this can be said: Should the book sell well, the people at Crown will have no problem in having money to help put food on their families.

Odds and Ends

That's Connery. Sean Connery
The man who is best known for his role as James Bond will be unveiling his memoir Being a Scot on August 25 at a book festival in Edinburgh.

Two more for Lehane
After the success of the film versions of two of Dennis Lehane's books, Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, two more books are primed to be translated into film. Up next is The Given Day, a novel set during the 1919 Boston Police riots. Universal and director Sam Raimi (both of Spider-man fame) are set to work together on the film version of the book. Also, production on Shutter Island is just about complete. The movie reunites Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, who last worked together on The Departed.

Based on a TRUE story

Remember James Frey? He's the author of the memoir "A Million Little Pieces," that became a bestseller as well a selection in Oprah's Book Club. In it Frey tells about his life of addiction and recovery and how he was wanted in three different states. Great story, right? The only problem here is that this memoir was fabricated. Later, Frey went back on Oprah to defend himself in the controversy about his book.

Following in that tradition, this week The Associated Press revealed two more memoirs that turned out to made up.

The first book was Misha Defonseca's “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years.” It is a recounting of how, as a young a girl, she lived with a pack of wolves to escape The Nazis, killed a German soldier in self-defense, and traveled 1900 miles across Europe to find her deported parents. It now turns out that Defonseca, now 71, made the events up.

The second fabricated memoir exposed was "Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival," by Margaret B. Jones. Jones shares with the reader her experience of growing as a half-white, half Native American with a black foster mother in a rough Los Angeles neighborhood. Jones also said that she sold drugs for a gang. The truth came out when Jones's sister saw an article on the up-coming memoir in The New York Times. In reality, Margaret B. Jones, a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, is white and grew up in a very well off neighborhood in The San Fernando Valley in California. She lived with her biological family and never sold drugs for a gang. She also admitted that the recollections in the book were based on the experiences of people she had met while working at an anti-gang outreach program in Los Angeles. So why did Jones claim the experiences as hers? "For whatever reason, I was really torn, and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don't listen to." That's all good and well, but telling someone else's story as your own is not helping them find a voice.

It is a fact that among readers non-fiction still sells more than fiction and one of the most popular kinds of non-fiction is the memoir. In today's market some of the memoirs that are selling extremely well are written by celebrities, because let's face it: it's a highly voyeuristic society when it comes to the lives of people in the public eye.

The other type of memoir that sells very well are those of people who have interesting stories to tell, particularly if it involves a hardship and the triumph over it, which is the case of Frey, Defonseca, and Jones. The problem with those three though is that their memoirs turned out to be fiction. And their fabrications go beyond the old "I caught a fish at least seven feet long" stories. These stories talked about true hardships and survival in life. In a lot of people's eyes, there is an unwritten understanding between them and the author of the memoir that the events are true and accurate as possible. Now, I concede that it's not easy to remember things exactly as they happened, but it's another thing all together to make up a story and pass it off as fact.

So, I would like to hear from all of you out there. What's your feeling on this whole fake memoir thing? No big deal or something that can be construed as a betrayal of trust between reader and author?