Another memoir of a terrible childhood has been exposed as a fake. This time it’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years by Misha Fonseca who’s real name is Monique De Wael who isn’t even jewish. It seems there is a never ending stream of made up or highly questionable memoirs of childhood abuse, concentration camps and the like. Some of the most well known being A Child Called It, A Million Little Pieces, Fragments and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. (More examples in this article.)
Since people are suckers for sob stories, anyone who can write convincingly and lacks scruples stand to make a fortune in this genre, if it can be called that. It’s hardly surprising that there are a lot of credulous readers out there, but it is a bit surprising that so many journalist swallow stories that are so easily disproved. For instance in Misha the author claims that she was brought up by a pack of wolves who protected her from the Nazis. The book became a bestseller and was translated to 18 languages, a wasn’t exposed until after 11 years. That means there must have been hundreds of reviews in respected newspapers and magazines by highly educated people who read it and thought “Wow, a pack of wolves to fend of those pesky Nazis, I should get me one of those.” Or maybe they just played along thinking it best not to argue with success. Who knows? On Amazon and elsewhere on the Internet editorial reviews of Misha are no longer to be found.
So how can you tell if a memoir of this kind is real or not? Well, there is a lot of money in these books and there are very few people who have actually led lives of this kind, and even fewer who want to share intimate details about it with the rest of the world. And of these few only a handful are good writers. On the other hand there are a lot of people who can write decent prose and who are willing to make stuff up if in the hope of becoming rich. So logically, if the book is both spectacular and well written it is most likely a fake.
Filed under: Arts & Culture, Books, Ethics | 2 Comments
Tags: A Child Called It, A Million Little Pieces, fake memoirs, Fragments, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
Maybe many childhood memoirs are faked (although I couldn’t say if this is the case or not), my childhood memoir, No Easy Road, available on Amazon, is completely true – every single last word.
Not every author is out to make a fast buck!
I haven’t read your book so it’s hard for me to have an opinion about it. But if it’s true then I wish you the best of luck with it.