Autobiographical Honesty – fact or fiction?

The literary world is often spiked with scandals about truth – memoirs where fact and fiction are well and truly blurred. Ishmael Beah’s memoir A long way gone is the latest autobiography under attack. It has been reported that the Ex-child soldier’s literary bestseller is ‘factually flawed’. The Weekend Australian revealed that Beah appears to have been two years older than he claimed when he went to war (15 rather than 13), and served two to three months in the Sierra Leone army (not the two years claimed in his book). The academic who helped Beah with his first draft puts it all down to poetic licence.

Other debates on autobiographical authenticity:

Oprah Winfrey touted the grimy autobiography by James Frey – A million little pieces. But later it became apparent that the drugs, crime and murkiness had been “dirtied up” for dramatic effect. A tell-all report in The Smoking Gun says:

When recalling criminal activities, looming prison sentences, and jailhouse rituals, Frey writes with a swaggering machismo and bravado that absolutely crackles. Which is truly impressive considering that, as TSG discovered, he made much of it up. The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post $733 cash bond.

J T LeRoy was unmasked as a literary hoax. S/he wasn’t a crossdressing teenage hustler pimped out by his Mum, but Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy was a pen name of American writer Laura Albert. Wikipedia has a good article on the unfolding drama of LeRoy’s exposition.

Another interesting fraud in the 1990s was Helen Demidenko. At the age of 20 she wrote the novel The Hand That Signed the Paper. It purported to be autobiographical and told the story of her Ukrainian father and uncle, who witnessed the destruction of their home and family under Stalin’s communists:

In order to write the book, Helen Darville, as she was then, took on the identity of Helen Demidenko, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants. In public, she wore Ukrainian folk costumes and alluded to a background of heavy vodka-drinking; reinforcing her ethnic identity.

Her book was extremely successful. To her own surprise, it won three literary awards, including the esteemed Miles Franklin award in 1995. But then all hell broke loose. Her true identity was revealed; Helen Darville, of distinctly British origins. She was exposed as a fraud. What ensued was a media frenzy. Waves of controversy split Australia’s cultural and literary communities. A couple of books and reams of articles were written, analysing the Demidenko phenomenon. And Helen Darville went into hiding.