Another Big Ass Fib

another personal story of suffering and triumph has turned out to be fiction. this story also involves an author who lied about her ethnicity. again, rather than paraphrase, i will quote a news article:

In "Love and Consequences," Jones writes about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American girl in South-Central Los Angeles in the foster home of Big Mom. One of her foster brothers, she writes, was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home. Jones also claimed she carried illegal guns and sold drugs for the Bloods gang.

apparently, fake memoirs are rather common. people like stories of amazing triumph over adversity and suffering, and the publishing world is apparently a sucker for fake ones.

That's One Big Ass Fib

Misha Defonseca, the Belgian woman who wrote Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, has admitted that her story was a hoax. rather than try to paraphrase, i will just quote this article:

[...]the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II.

[...]

Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.

Ms. Defonseca is not even Jewish. her parents were, however, killed by the Nazis because they belonged to the Belgian resistance.