Oh dear, another fake memoir. This one comes from the imagination of Herman Rosenblat, a Nazi concentration camp survivor who heartily embellished his story. (Surviving a concentration camp apparently isn’t enough of a hook.) He’s been caught adding a foolish love tale about his future wife — a kid at the time, as he was — tossing him an apple over the barbed-wire fence. The duped publisher and TV book promoter Oprah Winfrey (again!) are in full apology mode.
I went straight to Google and typed in “Fake Memoirs.” Like a mushroom that sprouted up overnight, a stub on Herman Rosenblat had popped up at the top of
Wikipedia’s list of notorious authors of fake memoirs and journals. (Of course, I wondered vaguely about the accuracy of an entry — especially a new entry — on Wikipedia. Oh well, I’ll deal with that when the “Brainstorm” bloggers all appear on “Oprah.”)
To consider this latest memoir commotion from a wider perspective, I suggest reading the wonderful Natalie Angier’s latest New York Times article about the way deceit plays out in the animal kingdom. There we learn that when it comes to lying, apes, monkeys, and chimps are right up there with us. In fact, they could teach us a thing or two about how to lie more charmingly — as in the case of the love-struck male chimp who, while getting all worked up over an attractive female, saw her alpha male approaching. He quickly tried to hide his romantic intentions by covering his swollen priapus with his hands.
According to Angier, the brainier animals on this planet (I presume that includes us) enthusiastically lie to one another, and at a rather hefty daily pace. One study she cites notes that animals confined in college (a.k.a. college students) tell an average of two lies a day. (Angier doesn’t tell us how many lies their professors tell, but I could make a pretty good guess.) And because those being lied to somehow don’t seem to know they’re being lied to a good 50 percent of the time, some researchers think there might be “lie blindness” at work. There’s apparently something in us that prefers the lie over the raw, unembellished truth. As the song “Lover’s Lie” by the country-rockers, The Derailers, puts it:
I have every right to ask questions.
But you know I’m not one to pry.
I don’t want to live with the sad truth.
I’d much rather live a lover’s lie.
In his famous Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set the stage for the fake memoir by telling the truth about the sweet, guilty pleasure he got from telling lies. He even built an entire philosophy on the problem of inauthenticity. Since then scholars have written many a big thick volume on Rousseau’s ideas concerning mendacity, and other scholars have written books about those books. Who knows how many untruths are secreted in all those thousands of pages?
Let’s just say that Wikipedia’s list of fake memoirists is by no means final.
