Salon

The shock value of a literary scandal usually depends on whether the author is telling the truth. In the world of fiction, a scandal often arises when people recognize themselves in the characters of the book. In non-fiction works, conversely, authors get in trouble when they embellish or fabricate apparently confessional memoirs.

Several literary scandals have recently rocked the United States. Young author Margaret B. Jones published a book titled "Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival," which described her plight as a child from an ethnic minority background growing up in inner-city Los Angeles. After associating with gangsters, she managed to escape a life of crime and settle down in rural Oregon. The book was praised by The New York Times as a "humane and deeply affecting memoir." The newspaper also interviewed the author in her house, where she talked of her gangland past.

This week, however, the newspaper had to revoke its verdict: The real author was revealed as Margaret Seltzer, a white woman with no criminal background. The article exposing the author directed its criticism at editors and publishers, rather than at the hoaxer herself. With fake memoirs on the rise, they should have checked more carefully, it wrote.

A similar incident occurred several years earlier, when JT LeRoy, the author of three books about underage junkies and drifters turned out to be a collective pseudonym for three writers. Back in 1981, a journalist named Janet Cooke received a Pulitzer Prize for "Jimmy's World," an article in The Washington Post about an 8-year-old heroin addict. Subsequent media attention revealed that the story had been fabricated and Cooke had to return the prize.

Europe has not been spared either. In her 1997 book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," Belgian writer Misha Defonseca (real name Monique Levy) told the story of a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis. It has just turned out that the popular book was a fabrication and Ms. Levy (nee de Wael) is not even Jewish.

Russia has a long tradition of literary mystifications; some argue that one of the oldest surviving secular texts, the 12th-century "The Igor Tale," is in fact an 18-century forgery, although serious scholars reject this claim. A popular genre today is memoirs written by ex-lovers of celebrities (living or dead), in which they romanticize and exaggerate a brief relationship. This genre has been pioneered and promoted by magazines such as The Caravan of Stories. Stars and their heirs seldom react to these stories: No one really sees them as non-fiction.