For someone who studies autobiography and life-writing for a living, it’s been an interesting week. Last Friday came the announcement that Misha Defonesca has admitted to having fictionalized her heretofore-claimed-to-be-true account of being a Jewish child from Brussels who escaped the Nazis by walking alone from Belgium to the Ukraine, sometimes sheltering with wolves. Misha: A M??moire of the Holocaust Years came out in 1997–two years after Binjamin Wilkomirski’s now-infamous Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, 1939-1948 came out, and only a year before the beginning of the questioning and research that would eventually discredit Wilkomirski’s narrative. Whereas Wilkomirski’s memoir enjoyed a swift triumph–and an equally swift downfall–Defonesca’s languished in the U.S. (though it has done well in Europe), and she and her coauthor eventually sued their publisher, Jane Daniel of Mt. Ivy Press, for breach of contract. And they won–$32.4 million (if Slate is right) or $22.5 million (if the Boston Globe is right). Daniel lost her appeal in 2005. But last August, she started up “Bestseller,” a blog designed to tell her side of the story–and then, as the months went on, to try and learn the truth about Misha Defonesca. It’s a fascinating case, one about which I suspect we’ll be hearing more. It’s particularly interesting to read Blake Eskin’s take on Defonesca (in Slate), since he wrote one of the books involved in the Wilkomirski affair. (If you’re intrigued by this taste of the Wilkomirski story, by the way, I highly recommend Stefan Maechler’s The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth [2001]. Maechler was commissioned, by Wilkomirski’s publishers, to delve into the memoirist’s claims about his past and determine whether they were true. His book includes both his utterly lucid and compelling final report and the full text of Wilkomirski’s Fragments. It’s a fascinating document.)
As if that weren’t enough falsehood for one week…
This morning The New York Times is reporting (above the [online] fold, no less) that the recently published Love or Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, reviewed in the Times last week by Michiko Kakutani, is not by Margaret B. Jones, a half-white, half-Native American who grew up as a foster child in South Central Los Angeles, packing heat, running with the Bloods, and dealing drugs. It’s not by her at all–because she doesn’t exist. Instead, Love or Consequences was written by Margaret Seltzer, a woman of totally different origins. In this particular case, I’m most intrigued by what set the debunking in motion: Seltzer’s older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, read a profile that the Times ran on “Jones”–complete with slide show–in last Thursday’s Home and Garden section. Hoffman then called Riverhead, who’d published Love or Consequences, to disabuse them of their misconception of her sister. I’m wondering whether Hoffman stopped short when she saw her sister’s pictures or whether she made it to the middle of the article, where Seltzer/”Jones” tells her interviewer, “[T]o me, family is a little broader than to the average person.” Riverhead is now summoning back all unsold copies of the book. I’ll admit that I was tempted to put in an order this morning, before the recall hit Amazon, so that I’d own a little piece of this history, but somehow I balked at the idea of putting the $16.50 in…well, in anyone’s coffers, really.