I suppose it's of a piece with my dislike of the Romantic artist-genius myth, but one of the things about this persona is that there's a big industry to it, though it's not necessarily literally rock stars. There's more than one way to do the rock star thing and in our era that can be through the memoirists epics.
Whether or not the lives are lived is less material in literature than it may be in music.
...
The power of the sob story is a power indeed.
Melodramas are still with us, as memoirs.
Whether or not the lives are lived is less material in literature than it may be in music.
It should come as no surprise that the long literary con of Dan Mallory began with a fake memoir. Fabricating pain for profit is, after all, a time honored publishing tradition.
Mallory, who published his bestselling, Hollywood-optioned first novel The Woman in the Window under the name A.J. Finn, was exposed last week as a serial liar by the New Yorker. He faked his resume, he faked cancer, he faked his brother’s suicide, he faked that his novel about an agoraphobic woman who thinks she possibly witnessed a crime in her neighbor’s apartment wasn’t just a hodgepodge rip-off of better written works like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the Barbara Stanwyck film Sorry Wrong Number, and the Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver 1980s thriller Copycat.
But what got him into publishing in the first place, where he became an editor and from there a novelist, was a faked memoir. His essay on his taking care of his mother as she died of cancer and he himself discovered he had a brain tumor, written while he was a grad student at Oxford, caught the attention of Craig Raine, the editor of Areté literary magazine, who called it an “astonishing” piece of writing. Areté publishes some of the biggest names in British literature, from Julian Barnes to Tom Stoppard to Ian McEwan, and Raine wanted Mallory to join their distinguished company.
The problem was the story wasn’t true. Mallory’s mother did have cancer at one point, but she was certainly not dead, just living on Long Island. Nor was his father dead, although Mallory had committed linguistic patricide on him in the same essay. Nor his brother, who... you get it.
While Mallory’s story seems remarkable — a con man using a sob story to sashay his way to literary power — it’s actually extremely common. The publishing industry not only attracts but rewards these fraudsters in large numbers. It fetishizes and exploits so-called authentic experience, especially from marginalized populations, but its insularity and homogeneity makes it ill-equipped to detect fakery.
There was a time, not too long ago, when every memoir detailing a miserable, marginalized life turned out to be written by someone from the suburbs. Margaret B. Jones, whose story of being a half-Native inner city gang member was lavished with praise by The New York Times for being “unsentimental” and “humane,” turned out to be a white girl from the suburbs. James Frey wrote a memoir about violence and hardship and a life of addiction, and he turned out just to be some guy from the suburbs. Danny Santiago wrote a supposedly autobiographical novel about a teenage Chicano moving in and out of gang life on the hard streets of Los Angeles, and he turned out to be some white guy from the suburbs. JT LeRoy wrote autobiographical fiction and memoir about his time working as a gas station prostitute, about coming out (and going back in) as trans, about having AIDS, about his abusive relationship with his mother. He turned out just to be some white lady from the suburbs.
Imagining and selling tragedy works. [emphasis added] Mallory’s literary career may have been very different had he not captured a gatekeeper’s attention with a fake memoir that followed the template of every other successful hoax. Publishing insists it is a meritocracy, but it is mostly a matter of having the right bylines and knowing the right people. The sob stories of family tragedy and cancer treatment were used to explain work absences, gain sympathy, and make himself noticed, as told in the New Yorker profile.
According to Christopher L. Miller’s Imposters: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity, the key to a successful fraud is to downgrade your societal position, to “cross a boundary from a realm of greater privilege to one of lesser privilege.” In order to successfully mimic authenticity, pretend to be poor if you’re rich. If your family is intact, break them up or kill some of them off. If you’re straight, go gay. If you’re white, try some literary brown or blackface. An authentic experience is an experience of difficulty. The act of writing is then an act of overcoming that difficulty.
The reason these frauds happen is because of the publishing industry’s and the audience’s hunger for authentic voices, particularly voices of suffering. Apologies to Barthes, but the author didn’t die, she became the text. Literature’s job — to articulate the unspeakable, to contextualize the seemingly chaotic and random, to humanize the other — is now handed over to the author rather than the book. If you, like Mallory, write a character who has agoraphobia, you had better have suffered from agoraphobia yourself. It makes the characterization and plot more legitimately authentic. Mallory invented many different parallels between his main character and himself during interviews and events, all in the name of promotion. The personal connection becomes the selling point. It gives the work the shine of authenticity, whether real or stretched or fabricated.
...There was a time, not too long ago, when every memoir detailing a miserable, marginalized life turned out to be written by someone from the suburbs. Margaret B. Jones, whose story of being a half-Native inner city gang member was lavished with praise by The New York Times for being “unsentimental” and “humane,” turned out to be a white girl from the suburbs. James Frey wrote a memoir about violence and hardship and a life of addiction, and he turned out just to be some guy from the suburbs. Danny Santiago wrote a supposedly autobiographical novel about a teenage Chicano moving in and out of gang life on the hard streets of Los Angeles, and he turned out to be some white guy from the suburbs. JT LeRoy wrote autobiographical fiction and memoir about his time working as a gas station prostitute, about coming out (and going back in) as trans, about having AIDS, about his abusive relationship with his mother. He turned out just to be some white lady from the suburbs.
According to Christopher L. Miller’s Imposters: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity, the key to a successful fraud is to downgrade your societal position, to “cross a boundary from a realm of greater privilege to one of lesser privilege.” In order to successfully mimic authenticity, pretend to be poor if you’re rich. If your family is intact, break them up or kill some of them off. If you’re straight, go gay. If you’re white, try some literary brown or blackface. An authentic experience is an experience of difficulty. The act of writing is then an act of overcoming that difficulty.
The reason these frauds happen is because of the publishing industry’s and the audience’s hunger for authentic voices, particularly voices of suffering. Apologies to Barthes, but the author didn’t die, she became the text. Literature’s job — to articulate the unspeakable, to contextualize the seemingly chaotic and random, to humanize the other — is now handed over to the author rather than the book. If you, like Mallory, write a character who has agoraphobia, you had better have suffered from agoraphobia yourself. It makes the characterization and plot more legitimately authentic. Mallory invented many different parallels between his main character and himself during interviews and events, all in the name of promotion. The personal connection becomes the selling point. It gives the work the shine of authenticity, whether real or stretched or fabricated.
The power of the sob story is a power indeed.
Melodramas are still with us, as memoirs.
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