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The coming year in memoir fraud

We here at Quillblog remember a day – back when we were young and having remarkable and poignant experiences we reserve the right to one day lay out in book form – when memoirs were expected to be at least within the neighbourhood of the truth. In these relativist times, however, when the boundaries between “truth” and “fiction” are just about non-existent, a memoir is most commonly defined as “a novel, told in the first person, that sells a hell of a lot of copies.”

Over at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke wonders how the hell this all came to be. Slate also give us a sneak peek at the memoir scandals we can expect to see over the next couple of months, including at-last revealed stretchers from St. Augustine (“’There’s just no reason to believe that the thornbushes of lust ever grew rank about his head,’ says historian Carlo Ricci….”) and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi (“Satrapi does in fact have both lips and eyelids. She also confessed to ‘completely making up the whole two-dimension thing.’”).

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